Autonomous real-time object tracking with an adaptive joint transform correlator

A hybrid optical/digital system for tracking an object in a sequence of images is described. Since a joint transform correlator does not require a matched spatial filter in the correlation process, object tracking can be carried out by continuously updating the reference image with the object image in the previous frame. This adaptive property of a joint transform correlator, together with the parallelism and high processing speed of an optical system, ensure high correlation between objects in two sequential frames. The relative position of the object can then be determined based on the location of the correlation peak. System performance is evaluated and experimental demonstrations are presented.