Stabilizing and deblurring atmospheric turbulence

A new approach is proposed to correct geometric distortion and reduce space and time-variant blur in videos that suffer from atmospheric turbulence. We first register the frames to suppress geometric deformation using a B-spline based non-rigid registration method. Next, a fusion process is carried out to produce an image from the registered frames, which can be viewed as being convolved with a space invariant near-diffraction-limited blur. Finally, a blind deconvolution algorithm is implemented to deblur the fused image. Experiments using real data illustrate that this approach is capable of alleviating blur and geometric deformation caused by turbulence, recovering details of the scene and significantly improving visual quality.