Defocus restoration for a full-field heterodyne ranger via multiple return separation

Abstract

Full-field heterodyne time-of-flight range-imagers allow a large number of range measurements to be taken simultaneously across an entire scene; these range measurements may be corrupted due to limited depth of field. We propose a new method for deblurring heterodyne range images by identifying multiple signal returns within each pixel via deconvolution, thus reducing the spatially variant deblurring problem to a sequence of spatially invariant deconvolutions. We have applied this method to simulated data, showing significant improvement in the restored images.