Achievable 5σ contrast on HR 8799 and β Pictoris. a: contrast curves obtained with TLOCI-A(S)DI, KLIP-A(S)DI, and PACO ASDI. All curves correspond to the mean contrast along spectral channels. For PACO ASDI, the solid red line is for the spectral mean S/N_ℓ contrast while the dashed pink line is for the spectral mean wwS/N contrast. The wwS/N contrast is the theoretical lower bound given by Eq. (22) when several spectral channels are combined. Contrast curves as provided by KLIP and TLOCI do not correspond to a 5σ false alarms rate contrarily to the contrast curves of PACO ASDI. The achievable contrasts are thus significantly over-optimistic for KLIP and TLOCI, see discussion in the text (Sect. 5.2.2). b: examples of 2D S/N_ℓ contrast maps obtained with PACO ASDI for four spectral channels: ℓ₁ = 0.9575 μm, ℓ₁₃ = 1.1589 μm, ℓ₂₅ = 1.3915 μm and ℓ₃₇ = 1.6054 μm. The superimposed white circles represent the locations of the known exoplanets.