Aerial vehicles can be a convenient platform for detection equipment for rapid radiation surveys of a large area. Traditional single-element detection systems are readily available and easy to use on moving aircraft. However, an aircraft's changing altitude or variations in the terrain underneath the aircraft can dramatically vary the source-to-detector distance, leading to distortions in the measured data. Even if the terrain and flight path are flat, the images produced by uncollimated airborne detectors are blurred by the detector's altitude off the ground. Building upon and extending techniques developed to correct images collected by the flawed mirror aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (Fullton, et al. 1994), we have developed a spatially-variant deconvolution technique which has proven effective at correcting the distortions and improving the spatial resolution of aerially-collected radiation data. We will present the technique and results obtained using data collected with a sodium iodide detector flown aboard a rotary-wing aircraft. A discussion of future research drections will follow.
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