Yes - there is an inversion process to recover geometry - but you can't do it with just one frame. If you have never seen a frequency/range image of an asteroid - then I don't know what to say. They are the input to the inversion process - and the output is a 3D model - not an image - though once you have such a model you can make such a rendering.
The images and animations we see now are hot off the press - and there has been no time to crunch them into a 3d model. As I said - I don't know when the first such results will appear.
Here is a link to a 2010 Icarus paper by Ostro, who was a co-author with Hudson on one of its citations. I believe it is publicly available. If not - it is Ostro et al., Icarus 207, 2010, 285-94.
http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/7_Ir ... 0.iris.pdf
The paper describes the full process of going from raw, delay-Doppler images to a 3D model, and includes the fuzzy, silhouetted 1/4 view images of asteroids that are commonly shown - and look like these new ones. I'm confident you have seen other such images depicted in the same manner - but the details may not have been included in the captions - as is the case for these new images. There are more recent inversion models based only on light curves - but it's even worse than radar in that it takes tons of poses to deduce a 3d model that is most parsimonious with the photometry. This asteroid will have models combining both radar and photometry I expect - but it will take a long time.
Note that I'm not denying that an inversion process can and will happen for these data eventually. But when it does - the output won't look fuzzy at all - it will look like a 3D shaded model. If you have conflicting information on how exactly these recent images were processed, then I welcome a pointer. In the meantime note that they are not only fuzzy, but they appeared quickly after the event, and they only show 1/4 of the surface. Furthermore, the animation suggests that the rotation axis just happens to be pointing directly at the viewer - i.e. out of the plane of the screen. That is what you would expect from raw data - and the apparent alignment is an artifact of having the x-axis be frequency. It is all consistent with being raw frequency/range images - like the ones you are unfamiliar with, but are depicted in neufer's reference and in my 2010 Icarus reference.
The neufer link is from a guy who keeps getting asked - Why do these images of asteroids always look so ugly? - and he is answering as best he can - describing the raw range/frequency images - which is what people are seeing and asking him about - as are people in this thread. I'm just trying to fill in some of the details I don't think he addressed.
zloq
