PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF THE SELF-REFERENCED SPECKLE-HOLOGRAPHY IMAGE-RECONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUE

Self-referenced speckle holography (SRSH) is a postdetection turbulenc e-compensation technique for obtaining diffraction-limited imagery fro m ground-based telescopes degraded by atmospheric turbulence. In SRSH, image-plane information is used together with wave-front distortion i nformation to reconstruct an estimate of the object spectrum. The wave -front distortion information is obtained from a wave-front sensor in the pupil plane of the telescope. This information is used in a postpr ocessing environment to estimate the point spread function of the comb ined telescope and atmosphere. The point spread function is then used to obtain an estimate of the object intensity distribution by deconvol ution. We present the results of a detailed performance analysis of SR SH. Performance is quantified in terms of a system transfer function a nd a system point spread function. The results show how the performanc e of SRSH is dependent on the sampling intervals and shot noise in the wave-front sensor. The results also indicate how the technique, for a given set of design parameters, responds to changing seeing condition s. For wave-front sensor sampling intervals of the order of a Fried co herence cell size ro and adequate light levels, SRSH boosts the high s patial frequencies (those near the diffraction limit of the telescope) to nearly 0.6.