New focal plane architecture and transform for fast target recognition

This paper presents a new concept for recognizing target shapes. The method depends upon establishing a uniform current density in a mesh of interconnected photosensitive pixels and characterizing the target image by potential changes at the mesh boundary. The concept proposes a way to reduce potentially hundreds of thousands of pixel values to a small set of signature values. The concept also removes the traditional time bottleneck of having to read the image off the focal plane before commencing analysis. The method is capable of easily handling target rotation and linear scaling.