Our goal is to analyze regularized image reconstruction methods such as penalized likelihood with respect to the performance of the Channelized Hotelling Observer (CHO) in the task of detecting a small target signal in the reconstructed images, in the presence of a correlated random background. We derive here an approximation to the performance of the CHO by working entirely with continuous-space formulations and then discretizing the final result. This approach leads to an extension and a refinement of approximations that we previously derived in the discrete space.
Anastasia Yendiki, Jeffrey A. Fessler