Composite versus multichannel binary phase-only filtering

Multichannel filtering and its inherent capacity for the implementation of data-fusion algorithms for high-level image processing, as well as composite filtering and its capacity for distortion-invariant pattern-recognition tasks, are discussed and compared. Both approaches are assessed by use of binary phase-only filters to simplify implementation issues. We discuss similarities and differences of these two solutions and demonstrate that they can be merged efficiently, giving rise to a new category of filters that we call composite-multichannel filters. We illustrate this comparison and the new filter design for the case of rotation-invariant fingerprint recognition. In particular, we show that the gain in terms of encoding capacity in the case of the composite-multichannel approach can be used efficiently to introduce multichannel-filter reconfigurability.