Image Restoration Methods for Imaging through Atmospheric Turbulence

 The performance of long-range imaging systems often suffers due to the presence of atmospheric turbulence. One way to alleviate the degradation caused by atmospheric turbulence is to apply post-processing mitigation algorithms, where a high-quality frame is reconstructed from a single degraded image or a sequence of degraded frames. The image processing algorithms for atmospheric turbulence mitigation have been studied for decades, yet some critical problems remain open.

This dissertation addresses the problem of image reconstruction through atmospheric turbulence from three unique perspectives: 1) Reconstruction with the presence of moving objects using an improved classical image processing pipeline. 2) A fast simulation scheme for efficiently generating large-scale turbulence-degraded datasets for training deep neural networks. 3) A deep learning-based single-frame reconstruction method using Vision Transformer.