January 2010
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36 Reads
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5 Citations
Long range imaging systems that capture video through the atmosphere face a major problem in the form of atmospheric turbulence. This turbulence causes a phenomenon called heat shimmer which appears as a blurring and a wavering geometric distortion of the target scene which limits the effective range of the imaging system. We explore an image processing approach to mitigating the blurring effect of this distortion by using a blind deconvolution technique to sharpen the video signal and a dynamic illuminance-reflectance correction technique to improve the signal's contrast. The algorithm is implemented on a Graphics Processing Unit to achieve near real-time performance.