Improved Pupil-Size Diversity Technology for High-Resolution Imaging with Faint Objects

Phase aberration is one of the prime factors that degrade the quality of observed images. Pupil-size diversity technology (PSDT) is a newly developed post-processing method for aberration correction and image reconstruction. However, images reconstructed using PSDT suffer from massive grains when imaging astronomical faint objects, which extremely limits its further application. In this paper, we propose an improved PSDT with embedded denoising reprocessing to overcome this drawback. Diversity raw images, generated by modulating the size of the pupil, are firstly processed by blocking-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D), a state-of-art denoising algorithm. Then, the traditional PSDT can be employed to estimate the wavefront and reconstruct a high-resolution image. Both numerical simulations and experiment demonstrations show that our proposed strategy exhibits superior performance for aberrations correction and image restoration of faint objects in view of its efficiency and robustness. Being capable of realizing high-resolution imaging with faint objects, this proposed method may have important application prospects in the fields of astronomical object detection, remote sensing, etc .