optics Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultra ...

, smear is used to refer to motion that has low temporal frequency relative to the integration/exposure time. This typically results from a relative rate of the image with respect to the detector (e.g., caused by movement in the scene). Smear is typically differentiated from

jitter In electronics and telecommunications, jitter is the deviation from true periodicity of a presumably periodic signal, often in relation to a reference clock signal. In clock recovery applications it is called timing jitter. Jitter is a significa ...

, which has a higher frequency relative to the integration time. Whereas smear refers to a relatively constant rate during the integration/exposure time, jitter refers to a relatively sinusoidal motion during the integration/exposure time. The equation for the optical

modulation transfer function The optical transfer function (OTF) of an optical system such as a camera, microscope, human eye, or projector specifies how different spatial frequencies are captured or transmitted. It is used by optical engineers to describe how the optics pro ...

associated with smear is the standard

sinc In mathematics, physics and engineering, the sinc function, denoted by , has two forms, normalized and unnormalized.. In mathematics, the historical unnormalized sinc function is defined for by \operatornamex = \frac. Alternatively, the ...

function associated with an extended sample :

\mathrm_\mathrm(u) = \frac

where is the spatial frequency and

\alpha

is the amplitude of the smear in pixels.

References

{{Reflist Imaging Science of photography