Turbulence mitigation pipelines evaluation

Abstract

Long range horizontal path imaging through atmospheric turbulence is hampered by spatiotemporally randomly varying shifting and blurring of scene points in recorded imagery. Software mitigation strategies have been developed to produce sharp and stable imagery. However, it remains challenging to correct video disturbed by turbulence in real time. Real time implementation of turbulence mitigation will search for compromises between processing performance and corrected image quality. In this paper we compare the quality of real time turbulence mitigation to the results of non-real-time algorithms that should provide a higher image quality. The paper presents the method for the data collection and the results of the comparison on different scenarios relevant in an operational context.