Cramér-Rao bounds on mensuration errors.

The Cramér-Rao (CR) bound is an inequality that sets a lower bound on the variance of an estimator. The paper presents an application of this bound to the problem of mensuration. Explicit results are given for the width of a pulse, incoherently imaged by an optical system. The results are given in terms of the SNR of the observed signal and the autocorrelation function of the system line spread function. The effects of another unknown parameter (pulse amplitude), an application to sampled data imagery, and the calculation of confidence limits are presented.