A Differential Operator Technique for Restoring Degraded Signals and Images

A technique is described for restoring signals, images, and other physical quantities that have been distorted or degraded by an imperfect measurement system. This technique is based upon the application of a specific differential operator to the measured quantity. For digital implementation, its advantages compared to other restoration techniques are simplicity, computational efficiency, and reduced core memory requirements. Calculations for a one-dimensional example indicate that restorations comparable in quality to Wiener-filter restorations are obtained with better than an order of magnitude decrease in computation time.