Indirect imaging problems in astronomy and surveillance

Keith Hege
MKS Imaging Technology, LLC
Astronomy

Indirect imaging is a broad arena encompassing imaging methodology wherein the final image is not directly sensed; what is directly sensed is information about the desired image. This arena is so broad that it can include everything from a psf-blurred focal plane image (photography) to interferometric sensing of the complex spectrum of the image (radio astronomy) or line integrals of the image (X-ray tomography). The problems in astronomy and surveillance to be discussed here are linked in that an adaptive optics telescope is part of the indirect imaging system, yet they include methodology as diverse as noted above. To delimit the presentation to a reasonable subset of that methodological spectrum, three representative applications will be presented: imaging through turbid media, Fizeau imaging with optical telescope arrays, and tomographic hyperspectral imaging. These applications all involve inverse estimation (deconvolution)
of the components of one or more convolutions. The emphasis is on the power of properly posed physical constraints in delimiting the ambiguity of the inherently ill-posed deconvolution problem.


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