An exact solution of the analytic equation of image quality from optimum quantization of microwave imaging data

An exact solution is presented of the analytic equation of image quality in terms of the entropy of the quantized aperture data. Previously published work provides an optimum quantization scheme that obtains the best image quality for a given distribution of complex aperture data and a given number of bits into which each complex data sample is to be quantized. An extension is provided to determine the number of bits required of the quantized signal for the image to achieve a given quality or, conversely, what quality of image can be obtained for a given number of quantized levels. It is shown that the theory imposes substantially no constraints on the distributions of amplitude and phase in the microwave data. It is also shown that the optimum quantization design derived from the theory is nearly scene-independent and may achieve real-time performance