Dr. Jean J. Dolne

Dr. Jean Dolne has recently achieved the SPIE Fellow level (following his Senior member promotion) for his significant scientific and technical contributions in the fields of optics, photonics, and imaging.

Additionally, Dr. Jean Dolne is a Boeing Technical Fellow, a level attained by only 1% of the engineering population. He is an international expert in the field of statistical image processing where he has pioneered the implementation of the phase diversity (PD) blind deconvolution technique (Maximum Likelihood or Expectation Maximization) in real time, reducing wavefront recovery and image enhancement latency from minutes on personal computers to less than 20 milliseconds using field programmable gate array (FPGA).

He is an expert at image/signal chain modeling to evaluate system performance, even before the system is actually built. He models the phenomenology throughout the signal path, from light source (passive or active) to target to sensor (while accounting for the physics/effects of the intervening media), iterating the design to satisfy his customer's requirements.

He developed computer simulations and advanced algorithms to reconstruct images for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) amplitude and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) intensity interferometry efforts. His algorithms resulted in considerable image quality improvement (delta-NIIRS (National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale) of +2, in certain cases) even though, at times, the data were collected at extremely small fill factor at the optical system exit pupil plane.

Dr. Dolne has been chairing the SPIE Unconventional Imaging and Adaptive Optics session since 2007; he has grown this session to encompass wavefront sensing, coded aperture imaging, and adaptive optics systems.

Dr. Dolne has been mentoring junior engineers to help advance their career potential. He is interested in expanding this mentoring opportunity to minority students, as well.