Efficient utilization of aperture and detector by optimal coding k.J. myers1

Performance for several apertures is presented for a number of Rayleigh discrimination tasks with signal and background exactly specified. Performance is defined as the squared signal-to-noise ratio of an ideal observer determined from statistical decision theory. The conclusions of Wagner, Brown, and Metz (1981) are shown to hold for different source-pair orientations and some other well-known (but non-ideal) figures of merit. When the background is assumed to be a known constant, and the source width and separation are also known, the performance of a simple open aperture increases as the aperture is enlarged. For a known source width a complex aperture can be designed which will give performance superior to a large open aperture for these simple discrimination tasks. For any of these apertures to be clinically relevant, performance comparisons over a wider range of clinically realistic tasks, including signal and object variability, must be considered.