Digital phase correction of a partially coherent sparse aperture system.

A digital piston phase correction method is presented for partially coherent synthesis with active or passive illumination. An anamorphic pupil relay causes a linear shift of a two subaperture array between the entrance and exit pupils. This shift separates the subapertures' cross- and auto-correlations while retaining their common spatial frequency information. Digital analysis of these common frequencies finds the separation distance and piston phase error of the cross-correlations and enables lossless correction of phase error. Corrected images are diffraction limited. Partial coherence affects the contrast of each spatial frequency, causing optical path difference tolerances to relax as system bandwidth decreases.