Inverse Filtering for Linear Shift-Variant Imaging Systems

A technique is introduced for inverse filtering of linear shift-variant imaging systems. The technique requires that the linear system be decomposed into a distortion of the input plane followed by a shift-invariant operation and terminated by a distortion of the output plane. Such a representation is motivated by the fact that the coma aberration may be represented in this way. The paper includes computer-generated examples of the inversion of a coma-like system with and without additive observation noise as well as one example of the inversion of a system specified by an arbitrary distortion.