Abstract
In this paper, we propose a new optical implementation for reference- phase-encoded joint transform correlation technique for efficient multiple target detection. The proposed method employs phase encoding for the reference image and nonlinear Fourier plane apodization for optimizing the detection performance. The reference phase-encoded joint transform Correlator (JTC) overcomes false target detection by eliminating the false correlation peaks while alleviating the effects of noise and other artifacts in just one-step thus ensuring higher processing speed. This technique yields only one peak per target instead of a pair of peaks produced by alternate JTCs. An all-optical implementation for the reference phase-encoded JTC technique is proposed and experimental results are presented.