Restoration of TDI camera images with motion distortion and blur

Abstract

Platform movement during exposure of imaging system severely degrades image quality. In the case of Time delay and integration (TDI) camera, abnormal movements cause not only image blur but also distortion, for image Point Spread Function (PSF) is space-variant. In this paper, we present a motion degradation model of TDI image, and provide a method to restore such degraded image. While a TDI camera is imaging, it outputs images row by row (or line by line) along the scanning axis, and our method processes in the same track. We firstly calculate the space-invariant PSF of each row using the movement information of the TDI camera. Then, we substitute pixels of the row and the ones of their neighbor rows together with the PSF into standard Richardson–Lucy algorithm. By deconvoluting we get the restored pixels of the row. The same operations are executed for all rows of the degraded TDI image. Finally, a restored image can be reconstructed from those restored rows. Both simulated and experimental results prove the effectiveness of our method.