Imaging in the Presence of Dynamic Distortions: Fundamental Limits and Practical Approaches

Abstract

Over the last two decades, there has been tremendous progress in characterizing and understanding the information theoretical limits of imaging. However, the majority of this analysis has relied on static and weak distortions. There is very limited characterization and understanding regarding the fundamental limits of sensing and imaging in the presence of strong and dynamic distortions, aberrations and interference.This project aims to develop new tools and theory to analyze and quantify the fundamental limits of imagingthrough dynamic distortions with completely unknown and partially known distortion characteristics. Specifically, we are interestedin characterizing the fundamental, algorithm-independent limits of (1) sensing static targets through dynamic distortions, (2) sensing dynamic targets through dynamic distortions, and (3) sensing static/dynamic targets in the presence of time-varying cooperative and adversarial active-illumination/interference. In addition, we will develop practical algorithms that attempt to achieve these fundamental limits of performance and test novel computational imaging systems capable of probing the practical limits of imaging through dynamic distortions.A key step in our approach will be the introduction of new metrics that provide a unified framework for describing and analyzing the dynamics of any measurement/distortion process. These generalized descriptors will allow us to analyze and improve the rich variety of imaging systems which suffer from dynamic distortions and (partially) unknown forward models.We anticipate the tools we develop will lead to practical algorithms for imaging through dynamic distortions and interference---practical algorithms that can be adapted to a variety of important application domains such as imaging through turbulence, imaging through scattering media, underwater imaging and synthetic aperture radar imaging.Approved for Public Release

Document Details

Document Type
DoD Grant Award
Publication Date
Jul 24, 2023
Source ID
N000142312714

Entities

People

  • Ashok Veeraraghavan

Organizations

  • Office of Naval Research
  • Rice University
  • United States Navy

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.
  • Theoretical Analysis.