Image Gathering and Digital Restoration: End-To-End Optimization for Visual Quality

Abstract

Image gathering and digital restoration are commonly treated as separate tasks. However, it is possible to gain significant improvements in fidelity, resolution, sharpness, and clarity when these two tasks are optimized together. In this paper, we demonstrate the improvements that can be gained when (1) the design of the image-gathering system is optimized for high information density rather than for conventional image reconstruction, and (2) the digital restoration of the image accounts for the aliasing as well as the blurring and noise in image gathering and practically eliminates the degradations that occur due to the blurring and raster effects in image reconstruction.