Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation Using Optical Flow

Abstract

Atmospheric turbulence causes blurring and geometrical distortion in images acquired from a long distance. In this paper, we propose a fast and effective feature based registration technique in removing the distortions caused by atmospheric turbulence. We utilize optical flow method and combine the advantages of previous approaches based on space-invariant deconvolution and lucky frame idea. After an optical flow based registration of degraded image sequence, a patch-wise multi-frame reconstruction technique is applied to fuse the registered images. Finally, a blind-deconvolution technique is implemented to deblur the fused image to obtain a single high quality image. The experiments performed on common datasets show that the proposed method produces higher quality images more efficiently than the available methods.