Noise Suppression in Microwave Imagery by Exploitation of the MTF Approach to Human Vision

Optimised presentation of images from a microwave holographic system is essential, particularly the suppression of the effects of noise on the human visual system. Recent research into the human visual system has led to Fourier models of the visual cortex, and the proposition that object recognition is possible on relatively few critical low spatial frequency components. It is therefore possible to suppress interfering noise without losing essential object information by designing a suitable filtering function compatible with the human modulation transfer function, noise and object spectral distributions. A technique is described in which an unrecognizable microwave image distribution is processed to yield a clearly identifiable target shape.