OBTAINING IMAGES FROM CORPS SYSTEMS Alfonso Gómez and Carlos del Río Public University of Navarra, Campus Arrosadía s/n, 31006 Pamplona, Spain. Email: carlos@unavarra.es ABSTRACT From the previous research at the Antenna Group of the Public University of Navarra regarding the working principles of the human eye, one of the conclusions was that the reconstructed image in the surface of the retina is defocused, being this fact the only explanation that properly justifies the visual acuity (or angular resolution) that the human eye has. The defocusing procedure is supported under the assumption of coherent coupling between the different cones (or photoreceptors), enhancing the signal/noise ratio but, in principle, creating a diffusion in the information (image) received by the cones. Luckily, because that coupling is coherent, there is no destruction of the information, so the process is reversible. In this paper we will try to demonstrate the possibilities of recovering an image from the one we could have over the retina, or at the output of any CORPS system, as the neural networks of the human eye could be doing. 1. INTRODUCTION When a photon “hits” the retina surface, it provokes an electrical impulse in a group of cones around the point of impact due to the coupling effect between cones. This phenomenon ensures the detection of the photon, but it also turns into a less accurate vision of the human eye, as it is reported in the reference [1]. A similar blurring effect happens in a CORPS beam forming network. For the purposes of this study, a CORPS beam forming network is a multilayer tri- dimensional waveguide structure with N input ports and M output ports, being used between the detectors (N) and the antenna elements (M). It basically consists in a smart combination of power dividers and combiners, trying to obtaining profit of the spatial diversity to improve the detection performance of the whole CORPS system. More detailed information of these systems could be obtained from the references [2- 4]. When a beam goes across the CORPS structure it suffers a broadening effect that assures its detection by the detector array, but it also creates a blurring effect that apparently reduces the resolution, as happened in the human eye when a photon arrives. If we believe the reference [1], and effectively this blurring effect improves the signal noise ratio but reduces the resolution, the use of these structures would have any sense. However, the fact is that the human eye has an impressive angular resolution, able to distinguish very small details at very long distances. The explanation of this phenomenon is provided in [2- 4] and it is based on the non-destructive coupling and the effective increment of the effective area dedicated to define each beam emerging/arriving from/to the antenna. Fig. 1.- Analogy between the human eye detection process (down) and the emulated detection process performed by a system based on CORPS technology aided by digital signal processing (up).