  The detection of high contrast companions at small angular separation appears
feasible in conventional direct images using the self-calibration properties of
interferometric observable quantities. In the high-Strehl regime, available
from space borne observatories and using AO in the mid-infrared, quantities
comparable to the closure-phase that are used with great success in
non-redundant masking inteferometry, can be extracted from direct images, even
taken with a redundant aperture. These new phase-noise immune observable
quantities, called Kernel-phases, are determined a-priori from the knowledge of
the geometry of the pupil only. Re-analysis of HST/NICMOS archive and other
ground based AO images, using this new Kernel-phase algorithm, demonstrates the
power of the method, and its ability to detect companions at the resolution
limit and beyond.
