Many imaging processes, including both conventional wide-field and confocal fluorescence microscopy, can be described to a good approximation as linear and spatially-invariant. Linearity means that the image of an extended specimen is simply the sum of the images of the parts of the specimen - in the limit the specimen can be regarded as a collection of points, and its image is the sum of the images of the points - i.e. weighted instances of the imaging system's point spread function (psf). In the case of spatially invariant imaging the psf is the same over the entire field of imaging. Mathematically, the image is the convolution of the specimen with the system psf. In principle, this convolution can be reversed to remove degradation introduced by the imaging process, a computational procedure often called deconvolution or, more generally, restoration.