Introduction to the Optical Transfer Function Book

An abundance of knowledge about the optical transfer function (OTF) has been published in many excellent articles during the past 35 years or so, but somehow aniche for this knowledge has never been found in the engineering and scientific structure. As a result, OTF publications are scattered throughout the archival literature of scientific and technical journals. Our book aims to bring together into one source much of this wealth of information.

Those concerned with grounding engineers and scientists in the procedures of optical evaluation have found that spatial frequency, wave-front distortion, and optical transfer function, though not particularly difficult concepts to understand, do not easily become part of one's thinking, and therefore practice, as the concepts of rays, ray tracing, and ray aberrations. The word ray (geometrical optics) is used so commonly in our language that it is no longer an esoteric term reserved for optics. Actually, there are advantages peculiar to each of the two viewpoints, and an optical analyst is handicapped by a lack of facility with either. We hope that our book is articulate enough in the art to bring practitioners up to speed in the realm of spatial frequency and the OTF.