Imaging through Atmospheric Turbulence

TurbRecon v1: Reference Frame + Lucky Fusion + PnP Blind Deblurring

Ground based long-range passive imaging systems often suffer from degraded image quality due to a turbulent atmosphere. While methods exist for removing such turbulent distortions, many are limited to static sequences which cannot be extended to dynamic scenes. In addition, the physics of the turbulence is often not integrated into the image reconstruction algorithm. In this paper, we present a unified method for atmospheric turbulence mitigation in both static and dynamic sequences. We are able to achieve better results compared to existing methods by utilizing (i) a novel space-time non-local averaging method to construct a reliable reference frame, (ii) a geometric consistency and a sharpness metric to generate the lucky frame, (iii) a physics-constrained prior model of the point spread function for blind deconvolution. Experimental results based on synthetic and real long-range turbulence sequences validate the performance of the proposed method.

Publication

Zhiyuan Mao, Nicholas Chimitt, and Stanley H. Chan, ‘‘Image Reconstruction of Static and Dynamic Scenes through Anisoplanatic Turbulence’’, IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, vol. 6, pp. 1415-1428, Oct. 2020.

Code

MATLAB download: (URL)

Packages included

- Plug and Play ADMM, developed by Purdue i2Lab
- Optical flow, develop by Ce Liu (Microsoft Research New England) https://people.csail.mit.edu/celiu/OpticalFlow/

Demonstration