An effort is made to synthesize speckle interferometric (SI) imaging technique, which is adapted (immunized) to arbitrary type of isoplanatic multiplicative distortions and does not count on usage of a reference sourse (RS), auxiliary wavefront sensor (WFS) and a priori information concerning the object being observed: all necessary imagery information is drawn from distorted image snapshots (specklegrams), total number of which is arbitrary (N 2). The proposed method makes possible the fusion of data acquired with various spatially separated equally-scaled optical systems affected by essentially different perturbing phase distortions within unified scheme. The procedure is based on Projection onto Convex Sets (POCS) approach and, in contrast to Blind Deconvolution (BD), enables the iterative estimate of OTF to be found only through the set of snapshots available and without appealing to current estimate of unknown object brightness. The solution uniqueness is briefly analysed. Generalizations of such SI-methods as Labeyri's Processing (LP), Knox-Thompson (KT) SI and Triple Correlation (TC) method are derived. The way toward possible algorithmic combining the data acquired with both an object under observation and arbitrarily corrupted RS (even though it may have unknown resolvable spatial brightness) is discussed. This aspect of proposed technique is important in the light of temporary difficulties associated with the high-quality Laser Guide Star (LGS) generation. Field results on unreferenced restorating the images of binary star and Orbital Complex (OC) consisting of Space Station "Mir" and "Soyuz TM" spacecraft are presented. Pursuance of research is motivated by desire for increasing the autonomy and universality of telescopes at their reasonable cost, what is essential for solving both astronomical and radar-aided space control problems.

Date Published: 31 May 1994
PDF: 13 pages
Proc. SPIE 2201, Adaptive Optics in Astronomy, (31 May 1994); doi: 10.1117/12.176033

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2201:
Adaptive Optics in Astronomy
Mark A. Ealey; Fritz Merkle, Editor(s)