Optical implementation of the sliced orthogonal nonlinear generalized correlation for images degraded by nonoverlapping background noise

We study the performance of the sliced orthogonal nonlinear generalized (SO NG) correlation for images degraded by clutter and nonoverlapping backgroun d noise. We present experiments on the optical implementation of the SONG c orrelation obtained by means of a joint transform correlator. Nonoverlappin g noise does not contribute to the SONG correlation, and the SONG auto-corr elation peak is insensitive to changes of background patterns around the ta rget and experiments show that this is not the case for other methods. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.