  A Rotating Modulator (RM) is one of a class of techniques for indirect
imaging of an object scene by modulation and detection of incident photons.
Comparison of the RM to more common imaging techniques, the Rotating Modulation
Collimator and the coded aperture, reveals trade-offs in instrument weight and
complexity, sensitivity, angular resolution, and image fidelity. In the case of
a high-energy (hundreds of keV to MeV), wide field-of-view, satellite or
balloon-borne astrophysical survey mission, the RM is shown to be an attractive
option when coupled with a reconstruction algorithm that can simultaneously
achieve super-resolution and suppress fluctuations arising from statistical
noise. We describe the Noise-Compensating Algebraic Reconstruction (NCAR)
algorithm, which is shown to perform better than traditional deconvolution
techniques for most object scene distributions. Results from Monte Carlo
simulations demonstrate that NCAR achieves super-resolution, can resolve
multiple point sources and complex distributions, and manifests noise as fuzzy
sidelobes about the true source location, rather than spurious peaks elsewhere
in the image as seen with other techniques.
