Restoration of Blurred Images Caused by Rectangular Sensor Elements in the Linear Array

A linear sensor array can be used to acquire images by push-broom scan mode. Usually the sensor elements of a sensor are square. However, in some special applications, the rectangular sensor elements are used, in which the images are blurred in the scan direction.The blur process can be modeled as a kind of smooth in the scan direction, like the motion blur. The paper discusses how to build the mathematical model of this special blur process. Under this model, some general algorithms were tested to deblur the images, such as inverse filtering, Wiener filtering and iteration method. A new method, pseudoinverse matrix method, was also introduced. The simulation results of these algorithms were showed and compared. In the experiment, some images were acquired from a linear shortwave infrared sensor of rectangular elements and these algorithms were used to restore the blurred images. The results prove the validity of the model and that the new method can deblur the images to some extent, while it saves more computational time.