Capabilities and limitations of pupil-plane filters for superresolution and image enhancement

The use of pupil-plane filters in microscopes has been proposed as a method of producing superresolution. Here it is shown that pupil-plane filters cannot increase the support of the transfer function for a large class of optical systems, implying that resolution cannot be improved solely by adding pupil-plane filters to an instrument. However, pupil filters can improve signal-to-noise performance and modify transfer-function zero crossing positions, as demonstrated through a confocal fluorescence example. (C) 2004 Optical Society of America.