Ryan Swindle, Air Force Research Laboratory; Douglas Hope, Hart Scientific Consulting LLC; Michael Hart, Hart Scientific Consulting LLC; Stuart Jefferies, Georgia State University
Keywords: Imaging, Image Restoration
Abstract:
Ground-based imaging of satellites during the daytime represents a formidable challenge due the strong turbulence induced noise in the imagery and the high background noise. Two important approaches for overcoming the problem of imaging through this strong turbulence include aperture partitioning and the collection of wavefront measurements for use in image restoration post-processing. The aperture partitioning enables a reduction in the turbulence induced noise in the recorded imagery, while the wavefront measurements can be used to constrain a frozen flow estimate of the wavefront. Together the WFS measurements and FFM enable the recovery of high spatial frequencies in the wavefront, which leads to higher fidelity estimates of the PSFs necessary for estimating the recovered image of the satellite. Improvements in image restoration due to the aperture partitioning will be demonstrated by comparing image restoration algorithms that used WFS data with imagery acquired using a filled aperture vs imagery acquired using an aperture partitioning scheme. This comparison will be made using imagery acquired in daylight using a 3m class telescope.
Date of Conference: September 11-14, 2018
Track: Poster