Beating the Rayleigh Limit Via Aperture Modulation

We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally a method to break the Rayleigh limit of an imaging system by modulating only the aperture of the imaging optics. By fully utilizing the useful information extracted from an image sequence, a superresolution image with high-frequency components beyond the cutoff frequency of the imaging system is reconstructed. Resolution enhancement of > 2 times is achieved experimentally. Simulation results show that the method can still work with the signal-to-noise ratio of ~ 10 for the acquired images.