Special sensor masking for exceeding system geometrical resolving power

The resolution of many viewing and staring systems is often restricted by the spatial limited resolution of its sensing device rather than by diffraction limits related to the optical system. This spatial resolution of the sensor, when limited by the pixels' dimensions, is coined hereby `geometrical resolution.' We suggest a technique for overcoming this limit, thus obtaining `geometrical superresolution.' The proposed approach is based on capturing a set of images, interlacing their pixels and applying special filtering over the interlaced image. The number of the captured images N corresponds to the desired resolution improvement. Each image in the set is captured after a lateral shift of the sensor by a subpixel distance of Δx/N, where Δx is the size of the sensor's pixel. The main contribution is in designing a special energetic efficient mask that is attached to the sensing plane. Without this mask, unrecoverable resolution loss prevents a qualitative reconstruction to be obtained.