Modulation transfer function of hexagonal staring focal plane arrays

The modulation transfer functions (MTFs) of hexagonally sampled arrays with both rectangular and hexagonal pixel shapes are derived from spatial averaging considerations. In one direction, the hexagonal pixel shape is shown to provide a 13.6% improvement in MTF at the Nyquist bandlimit over an equivalent rectangular shape. For the orthogonal direction, the hexagonal shape has a slightly worse MTF, which is 4.8% less than the MTF of the rectangular shape at the Nyquist bandlimit.