Dynamic simulation for distortion image with turbulence atmospheric transmission effects

The imaging through atmospheric turbulence is an inevitable problem encountered by infrared imaging sensors working in the turbulence atmospheric environment. Before light-rays enter the window of the imaging sensors, the atmospheric turbulence will randomly interfere with the transmission of the light waves came from the objects, causing the distribution of image intensity values on the focal plane to diffuse, the peak value to decrease, the image to get blurred, and the pixels to deviate, and making image identification very difficult. Owing to the fact of the long processing time and that the atmospheric turbulent flow field is unknown and hard to be described by mathematical models, dynamic simulation for distortion Image with turbulence atmospheric transmission effects is much more difficult and challenging in the world. This paper discusses the dynamic simulation for distortion Image of turbulence atmospheric transmission effect. First of all, with the data and the optical transmission model of the turbulence atmospheric, the ray-tracing method is applied to obtain the propagation path of optical ray which propagates through the high-speed turbulent flow field, and then to calculate the OPD from the reference wave to the reconverted wave front and obtain the point spread function (PSF). Secondly, infrared characteristics models of typical scene were established according to the theory of infrared physics and heat conduction, and then the dynamic infrared image was generated by OpenGL. The last step is to obtain the distortion Image with turbulence atmospheric transmission effects .With the data of atmospheric transmission computation, infrared simulation image of every frame was processed according to the theory of image processing and the real-time image simulation, and then the dynamic distortion simulation images with effects of blurring, jitter and shifting were obtained. Above-mentioned simulation method can provide the theoretical bases for recovering the blur images and analyzing the turbulence atmospheric transmission effects.