Investigation of atmospheric turbulence effects on extended objects in high-speed image sequences applying automatic image analysis

Abstract

A main goal of this investigation is to extract local qualitative measurements of elementary turbulence effects on extended image objects from fast image sequences. These local measurements are a prerequisite for the relationship between the local turbulence level versus the degradation of specialized automatic processes and allow the selection of a specific image treatment (e.g. adequate object model) or the tuning (e.g. adaptive turbulence filtering) of an automatic image analysis process (e.g. object tracking). Results of the developed analysis methods on different sequences showing diverse image contents taken in a well known environment (desert test site, indoor experiments, simulation) under various conditions will be presented and discussed with respect to different applications (e.g. local C N 2 -estimation).