SVDecon: Detail Recovery through Spatially Variant Distortion Correction
StarTools is the first and only software for astrophotography to implements true, fully generalised Spatially Variant PSF deconvolution (aka "anisotropic" or "adaptive kernel" deconvolution). The fully GPU accelerated solution is robust in the face of even severe noise, meaning it can deployed to restore detail in almost real-time in almost every dataset.
Even the best optical systems will suffer from minute differences in Point Spread Functions (aka "blur functions") across the image. Therefore, a generalised deconvolution solution that can take these changing distortions into account, has been one of the holy grails of astronomical image processing.
Innovations at a glance
The SVDecon module incorporates a series of unique innovations that sets it apart from all other legacy implementations as found in other software;
- It corrects for multiple, different distortions at different locations in the dataset, rather than just one distortion for the entire dataset
- It preferably operates on highly processed and stretched data (provided StarTools' signal evolution Tracking is engaged)
- It performs intra-iteration resampling of PSFs
- It is almost always able to provide meaningful improvements, even when dealing with marginal datasets and signals
- It is robust in the presence of severe noise, as well as natural singularities (e.g. over-exposed star cores) in the dataset
- Depending on your system, previews complete in near-real-time
- Any development of noise grain is tracked and marked for removal/mitigation during final noise reduction
- Smart caching allows faster tweaking of some parameters (such as de-ringing) without needing re-doing full deconvolution
- Doing all this, the algorithm at its core, is still based on true Richardson & Lucy deconvolution, and thus its behavior is well understood, documented and accepted in the scientific community, as opposed to black-box neural hallucination-based image re-interpretation algorithms.
