5,011 research outputs found
Single Frame Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation: A Benchmark Study and A New Physics-Inspired Transformer Model
Image restoration algorithms for atmospheric turbulence are known to be much
more challenging to design than traditional ones such as blur or noise because
the distortion caused by the turbulence is an entanglement of spatially varying
blur, geometric distortion, and sensor noise. Existing CNN-based restoration
methods built upon convolutional kernels with static weights are insufficient
to handle the spatially dynamical atmospheric turbulence effect. To address
this problem, in this paper, we propose a physics-inspired transformer model
for imaging through atmospheric turbulence. The proposed network utilizes the
power of transformer blocks to jointly extract a dynamical turbulence
distortion map and restore a turbulence-free image. In addition, recognizing
the lack of a comprehensive dataset, we collect and present two new real-world
turbulence datasets that allow for evaluation with both classical objective
metrics (e.g., PSNR and SSIM) and a new task-driven metric using text
recognition accuracy. Both real testing sets and all related code will be made
publicly available.Comment: This paper is accepted as a poster at ECCV 202
Airborne forward pointing UV Rayleigh lidar for remote clear air turbulence (CAT) detection: system design and performance
A high-performance airborne UV Rayleigh lidar system was developed within the
European project DELICAT. With its forward-pointing architecture it aims at
demonstrating a novel detection scheme for clear air turbulence (CAT) for an
aeronautics safety application. Due to its occurrence in clear and clean air at
high altitudes (aviation cruise flight level), this type of turbulence evades
microwave radar techniques and in most cases coherent Doppler lidar techniques.
The present lidar detection technique relies on air density fluctuations
measurement and is thus independent of backscatter from hydrometeors and
aerosol particles. The subtle air density fluctuations caused by the turbulent
air flow demand exceptionally high stability of the setup and in particular of
the detection system. This paper describes an airborne test system for the
purpose of demonstrating this technology and turbulence detection method: a
high-power UV Rayleigh lidar system is installed on a research aircraft in a
forward-looking configuration for use in cruise flight altitudes. Flight test
measurements demonstrate this unique lidar system being able to resolve air
density fluctuations occurring in light-to-moderate CAT at 5 km or moderate CAT
at 10 km distance. A scaling of the determined stability and noise
characteristics shows that such performance is adequate for an application in
commercial air transport.Comment: 17 pages, 19 figures. Pre-publish to Applied Optics (OSA
Physics-Driven Turbulence Image Restoration with Stochastic Refinement
Image distortion by atmospheric turbulence is a stochastic degradation, which
is a critical problem in long-range optical imaging systems. A number of
research has been conducted during the past decades, including model-based and
emerging deep-learning solutions with the help of synthetic data. Although fast
and physics-grounded simulation tools have been introduced to help the
deep-learning models adapt to real-world turbulence conditions recently, the
training of such models only relies on the synthetic data and ground truth
pairs. This paper proposes the Physics-integrated Restoration Network (PiRN) to
bring the physics-based simulator directly into the training process to help
the network to disentangle the stochasticity from the degradation and the
underlying image. Furthermore, to overcome the ``average effect" introduced by
deterministic models and the domain gap between the synthetic and real-world
degradation, we further introduce PiRN with Stochastic Refinement (PiRN-SR) to
boost its perceptual quality. Overall, our PiRN and PiRN-SR improve the
generalization to real-world unknown turbulence conditions and provide a
state-of-the-art restoration in both pixel-wise accuracy and perceptual
quality. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/VITA-Group/PiRN}.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 202
Analysis of deep learning architectures for turbulence mitigation in long-range imagery
In long range imagery, the atmosphere along the line of sight can result in unwanted visual effects. Random variations in the refractive index of the air causes light to shift and distort. When captured by a camera, this randomly induced variation results in blurred and spatially distorted images. The removal of such effects is greatly desired. Many traditional methods are able to reduce the effects of turbulence within images, however they require complex optimisation procedures or have large computational complexity. The use of deep learning for image processing has now become commonplace, with neural networks being able to outperform traditional methods in many fields. This paper presents an evaluation of various deep learning architectures on the task of turbulence mitigation. The core disadvantage of deep learning is the dependence on a large quantity of relevant data. For the task of turbulence mitigation, real life data is difficult to obtain, as a clean undistorted image is not always obtainable. Turbulent images were therefore generated with the use of a turbulence simulator. This was able to accurately represent atmospheric conditions and apply the resulting spatial distortions onto clean images. This paper provides a comparison between current state of the art image reconstruction convolutional neural networks. Each network is trained on simulated turbulence data. They are then assessed on a series of test images. It is shown that the networks are unable to provide high quality output images. However, they are shown to be able to reduce the effects of spatial warping within the test images. This paper provides critical analysis into the effectiveness of the application of deep learning. It is shown that deep learning has potential in this field, and can be used to make further improvements in the future
Experimental characterization and mitigation of turbulence induced signal fades within an ad hoc FSO network
Optical beams propagating through the turbulent atmospheric channel suffer from both the attenuation and phase distortion. Since future wireless networks are envisaged to be deployed in the ad hoc mesh topology, this paper presents the experimental laboratory characterization of mitigation of turbulence induced signal fades for two ad hoc scenarios. Results from measurements of the thermal structure constant along the propagation channels, changes of the coherence lengths for different turbulence regimes and the eye diagrams for partially correlated turbulences in free space optical channels are discussed. Based on these results future deployment of optical ad hoc networks can be more straightforwardly planned
Challenges and Opportunities of Optical Wireless Communication Technologies
In this chapter, we present various opportunities of using optical wireless communication (OWC) technologies in each sector of optical communication networks. Moreover, challenges of optical wireless network implementations are investigated. We characterized the optical wireless communication channel through the channel measurements and present different models for the OWC link performance evaluations. In addition, we present some technologies for the OWC performance enhancement in order to address the last-mile transmission bottleneck of the system efficiently. The technologies can be of great help in alleviating the stringent requirement by the cloud radio access network (C-RAN) backhaul/fronthaul as well as in the evolution toward an efficient backhaul/fronthaul for the 5G network. Furthermore, we present a proof-of-concept experiment in order to demonstrate and evaluate high capacity/flexible coherent PON and OWC links for different network configurations in the terrestrial links. To achieve this, we employ advanced modulation format and digital signal processing (DSP) techniques in the offline and real-time mode of the operation. The proposed configuration has the capability to support different applications, services, and multiple operators over a shared optical fiber infrastructure
Foreground segmentation in atmospheric turbulence degraded video sequences to aid in background stabilization
Abstract: Video sequences captured over a long range through the turbulent atmosphere contain some degree of atmospheric turbulence degradation (ATD). Stabilization of the geometric distortions present in video sequences containing ATD and containing objects undergoing real motion is a challenging task. This is due to the difficulty of discriminating what visible motion is real motion and what is caused by ATD warping. Due to this, most stabilization techniques applied to ATD sequences distort real motion in the sequence. In this study we propose a new method to classify foreground regions in ATD video sequences. This classification is used to stabilize the background of the scene while preserving objects undergoing real motion by compositing them back into the sequence. A hand annotated dataset of three ATD sequences is produced with which the performance of this approach can be quantitatively measured and compared against the current state-of-the-art
- …