A parallel implementation of the optical Gabor-wavelet transform

We present the architecture for a multichannel parallel correlator to apply a set of Gabor filters to the input image simultaneously. The basic featur es are: (a) a liquid crystal spatial light modulator displays the input sce ne, its pixelated structure produces several replicas of the Fourier transf orm of the object that are used for parallel filtering; (b) the filters con sist of a pair of centre-symmetric Gaussians (even Gabor filter); (c) speci ally designed prisms are located in front of the filters to separate spatia lly the resulting filtered images on the recording plane. Examples of appli cations to texture discrimination and oriented edge extraction are included .