Detection and tracking of rotated and scaled targets by use of Hilbert-wavelet transform

Appl Opt. 2003 Aug 10;42(23):4718-35. doi: 10.1364/ao.42.004718.

Abstract

In a recent work, we demonstrated the usefulness of the Hilbert transform in identifying the in-plane rotation angle between two objects. Here we use the Hilbert-wavelet bases instead of the Hilbert transform in the determination of the exact angle of rotation. We describe the design of the two-dimensional Hilbert-wavelet filter based on the spectral-factorization method to generate a Hilbert-transform pair of orthogonal wavelet bases. We compare the relative performance of the Hilbert transform and the Hilbert wavelet to identify both in-plane and out-of-plane rotation angles. We demonstrate that the Hilbert wavelet offers better rotation-angle determination than the Hilbert transform. We present correlation based rotated and scaled object identification and tracking using Hilbert or Hilbert-wavelet transformed infrared image sequences. We also demonstrate reduced data handling and improved tracking of distorted objects using the Hilbert-wavelet transform.