A new distortion-invariant optical correlation filter to produce easily detectable correlation peaks in the presence of noise and clutter and to provide better intraclass recognition is presented. The basic ideas of the minimum variance synthetic discriminant function correlation filter (which minimizes noise variance in the output correlation peak/plane) and the minimum average correlation energy filter (which minimizes the average correlation plane energy over all the training images) are unified in a new filter that produces sharp correlation peaks while maintaining an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio in the correlation plane output. This new minimum noise and correlation energy filter approach introduces the concept of using the spectral envelope of the training images and the noise power spectrum to obtain a tight bound to the energy minimization problem that is associated with distortion-invariant filters in noise while allowing the user a variable parameter to adjust depending on the noise or clutter that is expected. We present the mathematical basis for the minimum noise and correlation energy filter and the initial simulation results.

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Correlation filters with sharp delta-function correlation peaks [such as phase-only filters and minimum average correlation energy (MACE) filters] do not recognize images on which they are not trained. We show that the MACE filter cannot always recognize intermediate images of true class objects (e.g., aspect views or rotations midway between two training images). New Gaussian-MACE filters offer a solution to this problem.

The original minimum average correlation energy (MACE) filter is addressed by using a new database (strategic relocatable objects, missile launchers) and including noise performance, depression angle, and resolution effects on the number of training set images that are required. Major attention is given to our new MACE filter algorithms for distortion-invariant pattern recognition: shifted-MACE filters (to suppress large false correlation peaks), minimum variance-MACE filters (for improved noise performance), multiple symbolic encoded filters (to reduce the effect of false correlation peaks), and Gaussian-MACE filters (to improve noise performance and intraclass recognition and reduce the training set size).