DeepCLEAR: Intelligent Atmospheric Turbulence Removal and Object Recognition

AI-Based Methods for Mitigating Atmospheric Distortion

and Enhancing Object Detection and Tracking

Aim

Atmospheric turbulence distorts visual imagery, posing significant challenges for information interpretation by both humans and machines. Traditional approaches to mitigating atmospheric turbulence are predominantly model-based, such as CLEAR, but are computationally intensive and memory-demanding, making real-time operations impractical. In contrast, deep learning-based methods have garnered increasing attention but are currently effective primarily for static scenes. This project proposes novel learning-based frameworks specifically designed to support dynamic scenes.

Our objectives are twofold: (i) to develop real-time video restoration techniques that mitigate spatio-temporal distortions, enhancing the visual interpretation of scenes for human observers, and (ii) to support decision-making by implementing and evaluating real-time object recognition and tracking using the restored video.

Funder
UKRI MyWorld Strength in Places Programme (SIPF00006/1), Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA)

Research team

Core
Undergrad/Postgrad projects
  • Zhicheng (Frederick) Zou (2024), Enhancing Long-Range Imaging through Deep Learning: Mitigating Atmospheric Turbulence [Paper]
  • Disen Hu (2022), Atmospheric Turbulence Object Detection in Video Using Deep Learning [Paper]
  • Rachel Lin (2022), Dealing with Atmospheric Turbulence Distortion in Video Sequences
  • Haziq I.B.Mohammed Shafri (2020), Multi-Input Denoising for Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation in Video
  • Jingxuan Wang (2020), Atmospheric turbulence mitigation in video using deep learning
  • Jing Gao (2019), Atmospheric turbulence removal using convolutional neural network [arXiv]

Downloads

Publications
Datasets
  • BVI-Turb: Atmospheric Turbulence Dataset [dataset]

Related project
  • CLEAR: Model-based methods for mitigating atmospheric distortions using Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT-CWT)
Related publications from VI-Lab
Denoising in different modalities