Randomized apertures: high resolution imaging in far field

• Published in: Optics express Vol. 25; no. 15; p. 18296
• Main Authors: Peng, Xiaopeng, Ruane, Garreth J., Quadrelli, Marco B., Swartzlander, Grover A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 24.07.2017
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/OE.25.018296

We explore opportunities afforded by an extremely large telescope design comprised of ill-figured randomly varying subapertures. The veracity of this approach is demonstrated with a laboratory scaled system whereby we reconstruct a white light binary point source separated by 2.5 times the diffraction limit. With an inherently unknown varying random point spread function, the measured speckle images require a restoration framework that combine support vector machine based lucky imaging and non-negative matrix factorization based multiframe blind deconvolution. To further validate the approach, we model the experimental system to explore sub-diffraction-limited performance, and an object comprised of multiple point sources.