Method of Image Quality Improvement for Atmospheric Turbulence Degradation Sequence Based on Graph Laplacian Filter and Nonrigid Registration

It is challenging to restore a clear image from an atmospheric degraded sequence. The main reason for the image degradation is geometric distortion and blurring caused by turbulence. In this paper, we present a method to eliminate geometric distortion and blur and to recover a single high-quality image from the degraded sequence images. First, we use optical flow technology to register the sequence images, thereby suppressing the geometric deformation of each frame. Next, sequence images are summed by a temporal filter to obtain a single blurred image. Then, the graph Laplacian matrix is used as the cost function to construct the regularization term. The final clear image and point spread function are obtained by iteratively solving the problem. Experiments show that the method can effectively eliminate the distortion and blur, restore the image details, and significantly improve the image quality.

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