Restoration of nonuniformly warped images using accurate frame by frame shiftmap accumulation

摘要

When imaging through the atmosphere, the resulting image contains not only the desired scene, but also the adverse effects of all the turbulent air mass between the camera and the scene. These effects are viewed as a combination of non-uniform blurring and random shifting of each point in the received short-exposure image. Corrections for both aspects of this combined distortion have been tackled reasonably successfully by previous efforts. A potentially more robust method of restoring the geometry is presented, which is also better suited to real-time implementation. The improvements were achieved by replacing the concept of prototype frame with the sequential registration of each frame with its nearest neighbour and the accurate accumulation of shiftmaps from any one frame to another without redundant calculations.