Patent ID: 7973937

Claim:
A method for reducing noise in a multi-aperture imaging system having a plurality of sub-collectors, each sub-collector collecting a portion of a wavefront including noise and a signal of interest, at least one of the sub-collectors having an adjustable optical path length, the method comprising the steps of: varying the adjustable optical path length of the at least one sub-collector to each of a set of predetermined optical path lengths to generate a plurality of interference patterns, each interference pattern corresponding to a respective one of the set of predetermined optical path lengths; recording each of the plurality of interference patterns at an image plane of the multi-aperture imaging system to generate a corresponding plurality of recorded interference patterns, each of which is comprised of a plurality of pixels; generating a plurality of pixel intensity data sets, each pixel intensity data set including a pixel intensity level from a corresponding one of the plurality of pixels from each of the recorded interference patterns; Fourier transforming each pixel intensity data set to generate a corresponding Fourier transformed pixel intensity data set and identifying, for each Fourier transformed pixel intensity data set, one or more spatial frequencies of interest having power values above a predetermined threshold power level; measuring, for each Fourier transformed pixel intensity data set, the one or more power values of the one or more spatial frequencies of interest to generate one or more measured power values; and constructing a resultant image having a plurality of image pixels, each image pixel corresponding to one of the plurality of Fourier transformed pixel intensity data sets, each image pixel having one or more intensity values corresponding to the one or more measured power values for the corresponding Fourier transformed pixel intensity data set.