An Analysis and Method for Contrast Enhancement Turbulence Mitigation

A common problem for imaging in the atmosphere is fog and atmospheric turbulence. Over the years, many researchers have provided insight into the physics of either the fog or turbulence but not both. Most recently, researchers have proposed methods to remove fog in images fast enough for real-time processing. Additionally, methods have been proposed by other researchers that address the atmospheric turbulence problem. In this paper, we provide an analysis that incorporates both physics models: 1) fog and 2) turbulence. We observe how contrast enhancements (fog removal) can affect image alignment and image averaging. We present in this paper, a new joint contrast enhancement and turbulence mitigation (CETM) method that utilizes estimations from the contrast enhancement algorithm to improve the turbulence removal algorithm. We provide a new turbulent mitigation object metric that measures temporal consistency. Finally, we design the CETM to be efficient such that it can operate in fractions of a second for near real-time applications.