Performance comparison of photorefractive two-beam coupling correlator with optimal filter based correlators

The photorefractive joint transform correlator (JTC) combines two features. The first is embedded semi-adaptive optimality which weighs the correlation against clutter and noise in the input and the second is the intrinsic dynamic range compression nonlinearity which improves several metrics simultaneously without metric tradeoff. The performance of this two-beam coupling joint transform correlator scheme is evaluated against several other well-known correlation filters that have been developed during the last three decades. The result shows that the two-beam coupling joint transform scheme is a very robust correlator with respect to standard evaluation metrics for different sets of data.