Continuous surface fitting to spatial optical interferometer data

In this paper, we describe a practical implementation of an image reconstruction method designed to generate a map of the brightness distribution from data consisting of squared visibilities and complex closure amplitudes resulting from observations of an astronomical target with a broadband, multichannel, spatial optical interferometer. Given the data, the method estimates the true brightness distribution with a model sampled on a rectangular grid of discrete positions on the sky with the assumption that the model intensities in the region not defined by the discrete positions being described by bilinear interpolation of the discrete intensities. The developed image reconstruction method has been applied to real observational data obtained from existing optical interferometer facilities.