Joint digital-optical design of imaging systems for grayscale objects

In many imaging applications, the objects of interest have broad range of strongly correlated spectral components. For example, the spectral components of grayscale objects such as media printed with black ink or toner are nearly perfectly correlated spatially. We describe how to exploit such correlation during the design of electro-optical imaging systems to achieve greater imaging performance and lower optical component cost. These advantages are achieved by jointly optimizing optical, detector, and digital image processing subsystems using a unified statistical imaging performance measure. The resulting optical systems have lower F# and greater depth-of-field than systems that do not exploit spectral correlations.