Computational Imaging Through Atmospheric Turbulence

Abstract

Seeing through a turbulent atmosphere has been one of the biggest challenges for ground-to-ground long-range incoherent imaging systems. The literature is very rich that can be dated back to Andrey Kolmogorov in the late 40’s, followed by a series of major developments by David Fried, Robert Noll, among others, during the 60’s and 70’s. However, even though we have a much better understanding of the atmosphere today, there remains a gap from the optics theory to image processing algorithms. In particular, training a deep neural network requires an accurate physical forward model that can synthesize training data at a large scale. Traditional wave propagation simulators are not an option here because they are computationally too expensive --- a 256x256 gray scale image would take several minutes to simulate.