Trade off between resolution and noise in restoration by superposition of images.

The inversion technique of Backus and Gilbert is applied to the problem of restoration of optical objects by superposition of images. The problem is formulated in the general case of space-variant systems. Curves for the trade off between resolution and noise in restoring objects degraded by simple diffraction and susceptible to uncorrelated noise are obtained. The technique is used to restore a test object whose image is sampled at the Nyquist rate and to which noise (simulated on a computer) is added. Restorations corresponding to several points on the trade-off curve are obtained.