Accurate definition of correlation peak position by optical speckle-displacement correlation technique

An optical speckle-displacement correlator based on hybrid optical–digital joint transform correlator architecture with a digital first stage and an optical second stage has been used to determine the correlation peak position with subpixel accuracy, without the use of intricate interpolation algorithms. A thorough analysis and a calculation of the parameters of the second optical stage are performed in order to achieve the necessary magnification of the correlation peak, so as to obtain an accurate definition of the peak position. The experiment setup for the realization of the optical speckle-displacement technique was constructed with a digital Fourier processor as its basic component, making possible a joint power spectrum median and ring median binarization, and an optical Fourier processor. The results which were obtained demonstrate that a setup of this kind can produce sharp and narrow correlation peaks, and can provide the necessary magnification for finding the peak position with subpixel accuracy.