BINARY PSEUDO RANDOM ARRAY (BPRA) FOR THE ENHANCEMENT OF OPTICAL IMAGERS

Many fields today rely upon imaging systems, including medicine, science, manufacturing, and defense. The ability to extract accurate and precise information from a raw image is indispensable. Unfortunately, real-world limits on the performance of imaging systems, either due to the quality of optical and mechanical components or the nature of the physical processes used for image acquisition, strongly affect the raw image data. The major challenge for R&D is to understand the real performance of an imaging system reliably and to develop methods and techniques for image processing to increase the degree of confidence of the extracted information. We will develop a commercial product enabling, first, the quantitative calibration of any high-performance imaging system and, second, image processing to mitigate the imaging imperfections and realize a “true” image of the object under investigation. Once fully developed, our product with dedicated data reconstruction software will be technologically superior to all existing methods, including the slant-edge-based method described in ISO 12233, allowing us to effectively improve the resolution limit of practically any imaging system. In Phase I, we will develop a calibration test standard specially designed to possess a constant inherent power spectral density (PSD) and data processing algorithm for image contrast reconstruction and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.