Stabilization of turbulence-degraded video using patch-based reference frame

Abstract

Imaging over long distances in the atmosphere can result in significant degradation of the acquired videos due to atmospheric turbulence. This degradation can include problems such as blurring and geometric distortion, and it is challenging to correct these distortions because of their randomness in nature. To address this, a new method for improving the geometrical quality of video sequences of remote stationary scenes is introduced in this paper. The method uses a patch-based approach to obtain a reference frame from the distorted video sequence, selecting the best quality patches from different frames. A window-based image registration method is then used to estimate the geometrical shifts of the pixels, which are used to restore a high-quality frame. The proposed method is compared with two similar state-of-the-art video stabilization methods using experiments on both synthetic and real video sequences. Results demonstrate that the patch-based method outperforms the other methods in terms of accuracy.