DILUTE APERTURE DIFFRACTION IMAGERY AND OBJECT RECONSTRUCTION

Replacement of a large continuous aperture by a set of small apertures offers a number of advantages if the subapertures can be placed within the array so as to achieve minimal spatial frequency redundancy. Using an approach based on combinatorics and integer programming, we have found solutions for a linear array for N (number of subapertures) up to eight. In my opinion, too much emphasis has been placed on the subaperture positioning problem and not enough on the resultant diffraction imagery. To this end, we have calculated the diffraction images of extended incoherent objects for these optimum arrays. We then proceed to discuss inversion techniques whereby we determine the object intensity from the diffraction images.