A new performance metric for hybrid adaptive optics systems

Advances in Adaptive Optics (AO) systems and image processing techniques have allowed image reconstruction to reach new levels of sophistication with impressive improvements in resolvability. The products of these reconstruction methods are often compared by eye due to a lack of widely agreed-upon objective performance metrics. This paper describes a new technique for assessing the performance of image reconstruction algorithms and AO systems. A line spread function is extracted from an object's edges, and the full width at half maximum of this experimentally measured line spread function is compared to the full width at half maximum of the system's diffraction-limited line spread function. This technique is used with imagery of satellites taken with the 3.6m Maui AEOS telescope with and without an AO system and with image post-processing. The AO system in question allows for rapid switching between compensated and uncompensated imagery, so an objective comparison between the two is possible.