title: Imaging below the diffraction limit: a statistical analysis.
abstract: The present paper is concerned with the statistical analysis of the resolution limit in a so-called "diffraction-limited" imaging system. The canonical case study is that of incoherent imaging of two closely-spaced sources of possibly unequal brightness. The objective is to study how far beyond the classical Rayleigh limit of resolution one can reach at a given signal to noise ratio. The analysis uses tools from statistical detection and estimation theory. Specifically, we will derive explicit relationships between the minimum detectable distance between two closely-spaced point sources imaged incoherently at a given SNR. For completeness, asymptotic performance analysis for the estimation of the unknown parameters is carried out using the Cramér-Rao bound. To gain maximum intuition, the analysis is carried out in one dimension, but can be well extended to the two-dimensional case and to more practical models.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. shahram@ee.ucsc.edu
authors.forename: Morteza
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shahram
authors.forename: Peyman
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Milanfar
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003198:Computer Simulation; D044962:Data Compression / Q000379:methods*; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D015233:Models, Statistical; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted