New approach to measure the on-orbit point spread function for spaceborne imagers

A new approach to estimate the point spread function (PSF) of remotely sensed images is proposed here based on multiple natural point-like sources, i.e., subimages of the observed image. First the conditional subimages are extracted, and then a blind deconvolution technique is used to derive the PSF from these subimages. For a sampled imaging system with signal-to-noise ratio >20 dB, this method can provide a relatively accurate PSF result. Moreover, the estimated PSF can be applied to image restoration using Wiener filtering or other nonblind restoration methods. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI. [DOI: 10.1117/1.OE.52.3.033602]