End-to-end aperture layout optimization and image restoration for optical sparse aperture systems.

The optical sparse aperture (OSA) imaging technique is capable of improving the spatial resolution of a telescope while maintaining lower size, weight, and cost. The majority of OSA system researches separately focus on the design optimization of aperture layout and the method for image restoration, which have great design redundancy. In this Letter, an end-to-end design framework that simultaneously optimizes the aperture layout parameters of the OSA system and neural network parameters of image restoration is proposed, which achieves excellent imaging quality. The results show that adequate image mid-frequency information captured by the OSA system benefits network processing more than incomplete high-frequency information in a few directions. Based on this framework, we design a simplified OSA system on geostationary orbit. The simulation results show that our simplified OSA system with six sub-apertures measuring 1.2m each has a comparable imaging performance to a single-aperture system measuring 12 m.