Design of URAs by DIRECT global optimization algorithm

Coded aperture imaging (CAI) has evolved as a standard technique for imaging high-energy photon sources and has found numerous applications. Coded aperture arrays (CAAs) are the most important devices in the applications of CAI. In recent years, many approaches were presented to design optimum or near-optimum CAAs. Uniformly redundant arrays (URAs) are the most successful CAAs for their cyclic autocorrelation consisting of a sequence of delta functions on a flat sidelobe, which can easily be subtracted when the object has been reconstructed. Unfortunately, the existing methods can only be used to design URAs with limited number of array sizes and fixed autocorrelative sidelobe-to-peak ratio. In this paper, we presented a method to design more flexible URAs by means of a global optimization algorithm named DIRECT. By our approaches, we obtain various types of URAs including the filled URAs which can be constructed by existing methods and the sparse URAs which have never been constructed and mentioned by existing papers as far as we know.