Shift-and-Add Method with Optically Pre-Processed Stellar Specklegrams

We propose a simple optical approach for the convolutional pre-processing of stellar specklegrams in the shift-and-add (SAA) method. It uses an incoherent optical processing, where a speckle pattern on a displaying device is re-imaged and a point-spread-function of the re-imaging system is used as the convolution kernel. This approach is suitable for use in the real-time SAA-system recently proposed. Experimental results using observational stellar specklegrams displayed on a cathode-ray-tube-monitor are reported to demonstrate that the optical pre-processing improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the final image.