Super-resolution by pupil plane phase filtering

Resolution capability of any optical imaging system is limited by residual aberrations as well as diffraction effects. Overcoming this fundamental limit is called super-resolution. Several new paradigms for super-resolution in optical systems use ‘a posteriori’ digital image processing. In these ventures the three-dimensional point spread function (PSF) of the lens plays a key role in image acquisition. A straightforward tailoring of the PSF can be performed by appropriate pupil plane filtering. With a brief review of the state-of-art in this research area, this paper dwells upon the inverse problem of global optimization of the pupil function by phase filtering in accordance with the desired PSF.