  Deconvolution of the telescope Point Spread Function (PSF) is necessary for
even moderate dynamic range imaging with interferometric telescopes. The
process of deconvolution can be treated as a search for a model image such that
the residual image is consistent with the noise model. For any search
algorithm, a parameterized function representing the model such that it
fundamentally separates signal from noise will give optimal results. In this
paper, the first in a series of forthcoming papers, we argue that in general,
spatial correlation length (a measure of the scale of emission) is a stronger
separator of the signal from the noise, compared to the strength of the signal
alone. Consequently scale sensitive deconvolution algorithms result into more
noise-like residuals. We present a scale-sensitive deconvolution algorithm for
radio interferometric images, which models the image as a collection of
Adaptive Scale Pixels (Asp). Some attempts at optimizing the runtime
performance are also presented.
