Comparison of two terrestrial atmospheric turbulence suppression algorithms (March 2007)

This paper describes the problem of capturing video through turbulent atmosphere (also referred to as heat shimmer or heat scintillation) and describes some of the existing methods used in an attempt to counteract the problem. Within this problem of imaging through turbulent atmosphere there is a distinct lack of comparisons between methods and a reliable metric for digital images. This paper contributes through the selection of two algorithms which are implemented, tested and compared, one a power spectrum restoration approach from the early 1990's and a newer image registration and fusion based method. The results show the ability of the old power spectrum method to stabilize the image although local object motion presents a problem, as well as the computational complexity of the image registration method.