You have a camera look at things and photograph them. If you look at the photo and compare it to the original object, you will notice mistakes (distortions, out-of-focus areas…).
Basically the camera setup blurs your image.
The *way* your image is blurred is not (completely) random however. You can describe it using math – which allows you to do useful things.
The math of how an object gets blurred along a line is the line-spread function.
The math of how an object gets blurred in a 2D-plane is the point-spread function.
[It fits in the wider context of Optical Transfer Functions.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_transfer_function)
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