MIRA: an effective imaging algorithm for optical interferometry

Abstract

This paper presents MIRA, a Multi-aperture Image Reconstruction Algorithm, which has been specifically developed for image restoration from optical interferometric data. The sought image satisfies agreement with the input interferometric data and with some a priori image properties (positivity, normalization and regularization). The algorithm can cope with very limited amount of data; as an extreme case, MIRA is able to restore images without any Fourier phase information. This leads to the possibility to perform imaging with only 2 telescopes or when the phase closures are corrupted.