Abstract

In the early 1970s Richardson¹ and Lucy² published an iterative method for recovering images of objects that appear blurred. Their method has been rediscovered by Shepp and Vardi³ for imaging radionuclides. The connection between these two seemingly disparate fields of science—restoring optical imagery and radionuclide imaging—occurs because they are inverse-problems having a common mathematical description. The purpose of this paper is to note some implications for restoring optical imagery of recent developments in radionuclide imaging.^3-5 These developments yield extensions of the Richardson-Lucy iteration that have proved to be powerful for restoring images from quantum-limited data. An application to images acquired with the Hubble Space Telescope is given.

© 1991 Optical Society of America