Nonsymmetric Fourier transforming with an anamorphic system

The idea of obtaining a nonsymmetric Fourier transform with crossed cylindrical lenses of different focal lengths is presented. The anamorphic rotation-variant system produces a scaled Fourier transform F(u,mv) of an object f(x,y), where m is a scaling constant. The system performs controlled angular magnification of an object spectrum. It is shown that the super resolution in one direction is gained by reducing the number of degrees of freedom of the optical message in the other. Experimental results are shown where the scaling constant m of up to 10 has been obtained.