A scalable architecture for real-time synthetic-focus imaging

A scalable architecture for forming real-time synthetic focus images is described and the design of a 256-channel system using currently-available technology is presented as an example implementation of the architecture. The parallelism of the system scales directly with the number of array elements and the image computation rate for a given image size (in pixels) stays constant as the number of array elements is increased. The system leverages earlier work in the real-time generation of the required time-of-flight surfaces and allows either real-time image generation or iterative adaptive image generation from a single complete data set.