A Reconfigurable Acousto-optical Implementation of the Hough Transform

Abstract

The Hough transform (HT) is widely used in many pattern recognition problems to detect different features in the image by transforming each image pixel into parameter space using parametric equation of the shape to be detected. Digital techniques to implement HT require a very large accumulator memory and a large number of calculations and as such are limited to nonreal-time problems. To implement a real time transformation the massively parallel connectivity of neural network along with the high-speed, interference-free processing of optical systems can be applied[1]. Previous optical HTs were limited to the switching speed of the 2D SLM[2]. In our new implementation(Figure 1) the computation time is the aperture time of the AO cell, and is independent of the image size. Additionally there are no mechanical components, and the computation is substantially simpler than that in the other techniques.