Restoration and Enhancement of Experimental Data

Given degraded experimental data, most researchers desire a restoration of the original appearance of the quantities being measured. Many, however, are satisfied with the results of almost any ad hoc method that improves the resolution. Another important consideration for many researchers is the unambiguous display of the quantities of interest in the data. Each of these items will be addressed in turn. 

For many data of interest, the degrading effects can be expressed as a convolution of the original appearance of the data with the appropriate 

There are a number of methods, nearly all iterative, that treat the inverse problem of recovery and successfully (some quite imaginatively) deal with the noise problem. The straightforward inverse-filtered estimate was adhered to in this research because of the possibility of saving computational time in the overall restoration. In practice, only discrete data are taken. 

The discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of the data is evaluated to take advantage of the considerable speed and accuracy of the fast-Fourier-transform algorithm as calculated by modern digital computers. For most 

Function continuation procedures are applied to many other problems besides inverse-filtered Fourier spectral continuation and will be discussed in a separate section. 

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