Abstract
High-resolution telescopic imaging is of great importance in astronomy. Compared to the complexity and huge cost of constructing extremely-large telescopes, super-resolution technique which breaks the diffraction limit of the imaging system can enhance the spatial resolution with compact setup and low cost. In this paper, a novel super-resolution telescopic imaging method based on aperture modulation and intensity extrapolation is demonstrated, with both simulated and experimental studies performed. The simulation results show that the method can enhance the resolving power of a diffraction-limited telescopic imaging system by >5 times in noise-free case, and the improvement still reaches ~1.8 times with a signal-to-noise ratio of only ~10. The preliminary experimental results show a resolution enhancement of ~1.36 times for the limitations of the experimental setup. Better performance is possible with the images for reconstruction denoised and registered more precisely. The method is also useful in wide-field microscopy.
Highlights
High-resolution telescopic imaging is a necessity in astronomy, especially in the research of binary stars[1], exoplanets[2] and gravitational lenses[3]
SR technologies are common in microscopic imaging[10,11,12], with several robust SR techniques: photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM)[10], stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM)[11] and stimulated emission depletion microscopy (STED)[12]
The results show that the mean squared error (MSE) decrease rapidly with the increase of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the case of SNR < 10, and become relatively stable with small variations with SNR in the range of 10 to 100
Summary
High-resolution telescopic imaging is a necessity in astronomy, especially in the research of binary stars[1], exoplanets[2] and gravitational lenses[3]. Space telescopes or ground-based telescopes with perfect adaptive optics (AO) systems can reach diffraction-limited spatial resolution[4]. Super-resolution (SR) technologies can break the diffraction limit of the imaging system and enhance the spatial resolution of telescopes with compact setup and low cost, which makes SR telescopic imaging attractive and meaningful. SR technologies based on image reconstruction usually use a single or a sequence of low-resolution images to produce a high-resolution image This kind of SR techniques attempt to retrieve the lost image details caused by insufficient sampling of imaging sensor, camera movement, ambient light, imperfect position of CCD camera, and so on[13]. There is no agreement yet on the best setup of such devices[19]
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