Registration fiducials for automated alignment with optical processing

Since automated assembly, as well as automated inspection and sorting, usually require prealigned work-pieces, the availability of rapid and simple automatic alignment is a prerequisite to widespread acceptance of such systems. Coherent optical correlators potentially offer the necessary speed, but they have required mechanically coupled image rotation prisms and spatial light modulators and are, therefore, quite complicated and cumbersome. We describe here an alternative approach in which circularly symmetric fiducials are incorporated into the object itself and detected with an incoherent optical correlator. With incoherent correlators there is no need for spatial light modulators; also, the fiducials are so chosen that the correlation is not rotation sensitive. Since several (typically three) identical fiducials are used, their location can provide sufficient information on the object orientation. The approach was tested in the laboratory, and some experimental examples are included.