COMPOSITE VERSUS MULTICHANNEL BINARY PHASE-ONLY FILTERING

Multichannel filtering and its inherent capacity for the implementatio n of data-fusion algorithms for high-level image processing, as well a s composite filtering and its capacity for distortion-invariant patter n-recognition tasks, are discussed and compared. Both approaches are a ssessed by use of binary phase-only filters to simplify implementation issues. We discuss similarities and differences of these two solution s and demonstrate that they can be merged efficiently, giving rise to a new category of filters that we call composite-multichannel filters. We illustrate this comparison and the new filter design for the case of rotation-invariant fingerprint recognition. In particular, we show that the gain in terms of encoding capacity in the case of the composi te-multichannel approach can be used efficiently to introduce multicha nnel-filter reconfigurability. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.