Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation Using Optical Flow

Atmospheric turbulence causes blurring and geometrical distortion in images acquired from a long distance. In this paper, we propose a fast and effective feature based registration technique in removing the distortions caused by atmospheric turbulence. We utilize optical flow method and combine the advantages of previous approaches based on space invariant deconvolution and lucky frame idea. After an optical flow based registration of degraded image sequence, a patch-wise multi-frame reconstruction technique is applied to fuse the registered images. Finally, a blind-deconvolution technique is implemented to deblur the fused image to obtain a single high quality image. The experiments performed on common datasets show that the proposed method produces higher quality images more efficiently than the available methods.