Image gathering and digital restoration

This paper seeks to unite two disciplines: the electro-optical design of image gathering and display devices and the digital processing for image restoration. So far, these two disciplines have remained independent, following distinctly separate traditions. However, the best possible performance can be attained only when the digital processing algorithm accounts for the critical limiting factors of image gathering and display and the image-gathering device is designed to enhance the performance of the digital-processing algorithm. The following salient advantages accrue: 1. Spatial detail as fine as the sampling interval of the image-gathering device ordinarily can be restored sharply and clearly. 2. Even finer spatial detail than the sampling interval can be restored by combining a multiresponse image-gathering sequence with a restoration filter that properly reassembles the within-passband and aliased signal components. 3. The visual quality produced by traditional image gathering (e.g. television camera) and reconstruction (e.g. cubic convolution) can be improved with a small-kernel restoration operator without an increase in digital processing. 4. The enhancement of radiance-field transitions can be improved for dynamic-range compression (to suppress shadow obscurations) and for edge detection (for computer vision).