Three-Dimensional Automatic Target Recognition System Based on Optical Integral Imaging Reconstruction

In this paper, we present a three-dimensional (3-D) automatic target recognition system based on optical integral imaging reconstruction. In integral imaging, elemental images of the reference and target 3-D objects are obtained through a lenslet array or a camera array. Then, reconstructed 3-D images at various reconstruction depths can be optically generated on the output plane by back-projecting these elemental images onto a display panel. 3-D automatic target recognition can be implemented using computational integral imaging reconstruction and digital nonlinear correlation filters. However, these methods require non-trivial computation time for reconstruction and recognition. Instead, we implement 3-D automatic target recognition using optical cross-correlation between the reconstructed 3-D reference and target images at the same reconstruction depth. Our method depends on an all-optical structure to realize a real-time 3-D automatic target recognition system. In addition, we use a nonlinear correlation filter to improve recognition performance. To prove our proposed method, we carry out the optical experiments and report recognition results.