Coherent optical production of the Hough transform.
The Hough transform (HT) is an efficient shape detector that maps straight lines into a two-parameter feature space. Recently it has been pointed out that the forward Radon transform (FRT), well known from the theory of computed tomography, and the HT are equivalent for binary images. In this paper, analog coherent optical implementation of the FRT is discussed. The FRT will not only be of use in implementing the HT shape descriptors but also act as a coherent optical preprocessor for the implementation of multidimensional convolution, correlation, and spectral analysis using 1-D acoustooptical signal processing devices. Several different coherent optical FRT architectures are presented. Experimental results using conventional coherent Fourier transform configuration are given. The relationship between the coherent optical implementation of the FRT and the inverse Radon transform, an important tool in computed tomography, is also detailed.