RESOLUTION ENHANCEMENT AND ZOOM BY DEGRADATION ESTIMATES

In this invention, the resolution is enhanced by first effectively decreasing the scan angle subtended between adjacent samples significantly below that of the Rayleigh limit to obtain an image blurred by the point spread function (or diffraction pattern) of the aperture. The next step is to process this blurred image to at least partially remove the blur. The unblurring process consists of convolving this finely sampled blurred image with a specially designed convolution mask. This mask effectively outputs an enhanced pixel at each step of the convolution. The mask simultaneously performs the equivalent of the following operations: PA0 (1) blur the image again; PA0 (2) subtract this reblurred image from the original image to form degradation estimates; and PA0 (3) add the estimates of the losses back into the original image.