Patch-based local Turbulence Compensation in anisoplanatic Conditions

Infrared imagery over long ranges is hampered by atmospheric turbulence effects, leading to spatial resolutions worse than expected by a diffraction limited sensor system. This diminishes the recognition range and it is therefore important to compensate visual degradation due to atmospheric turbulence. The amount of turbulence is spatially varying due to anisoplanatic conditions, while the isoplanatic angle varies with atmospheric conditions. But also the amount of turbulence varies significantly in time. In this paper a method is proposed that performs turbulence compensation using a patch-based approach. In each patch the turbulence is considered to be approximately spatially and temporally constant. Our method utilizes multi-frame super-resolution, which incorporates local registration, fusion and deconvolution of the data and also can increase the resolution. This makes our method especially suited to use under anisoplanatic conditions. In our paper we show that our method is capable of compensating the effects of mild to strong turbulence conditions.