Marginal blind deconvolution of adaptive optics retinal images

Adaptive Optics corrected flood imaging of the retina has been in use for more than a decade and is now a well-developed technique. Nevertheless, raw AO flood images are usually of poor contrast because of the three-dimensional nature of the imaging, meaning that the image contains information coming from both the in-focus plane and the out-of-focus planes of the object, which also leads to a loss in resolution. Interpretation of such images is therefore difficult without an appropriate post-processing, which typically includes image deconvolution. The deconvolution of retina images is difficult because the point spread function (PSF) is not well known, a problem known as blind deconvolution. We present an image model for dealing with the problem of imaging a 3D object with a 2D conventional imager in which the recorded 2D image is a convolution of an invariant 2D object with a linear combination of 2D PSFs. The blind deconvolution problem boils down to estimating the coefficients of the PSF linear combination. We show that the conventional method of joint estimation fails even for a small number of coefficients. We derive a marginal estimation of the unknown parameters (PSF coefficients, object Power Spectral Density and noise level) followed by a MAP estimation of the object. We show that the marginal estimation has good statistical convergence properties and we present results on simulated and experimental data. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America