Image enhancement by local information fusion with pre-processing and composed metric

An imaging enhancement technique capable of mitigating the effect of atmospheric turbulence on wide field-of-view images is presented. The method is based on the local information fusion from a set of short-exposure anisoplanatic images. Since anisoplanatism affects short-exposure images locally, the synthetic imaging algorithm uses local image quality information. Pre-processing of the source data and use of a composed image quality metric are considered. The synthetic imaging technique is tested on experimental data. The synthesized images show an improvement in image quality compared to the original set of images.