Abstract:Atmospheric turbulence severely degrades video quality by introducing distortions such as geometric warping, blur, and temporal flickering, posing significant challenges to both visual clarity and temporal consistency. Current state-of-the-art methods are based on transformer, 3D architectures and require multi-frame input, but their large computational cost and memory usage limit real-time deployment, especially in resource-constrained scenarios. In this work, we propose ReMATF, a lightweight recurrent framework that restores videos using only two frames at a time while preserving spatial detail and temporal stability. ReMATF combines a multi-scale encoder-decoder with temporal warping and a motion-adaptive temporal fusion module that performs per-pixel fusion between the warped previous output and the current prediction to enhance coherence without enlarging the temporal window. This design reduces flicker, sharpens details, and remains efficient. Experiments on synthetic and real turbulence datasets show consistent improvements in PSNR/SSIM and perceptual quality (LPIPS), along with substantially faster inference than multi-frame transformer baselines, making ReMATF suitable turbulence mitigation in resource-constrained scenarios.
Abstract:Atmospheric turbulence in long-range imaging significantly degrades the quality and fidelity of captured scenes due to random variations in both spatial and temporal dimensions. These distortions present a formidable challenge across various applications, from surveillance to astronomy, necessitating robust mitigation strategies. While model-based approaches achieve good results, they are very slow. Deep learning approaches show promise in image and video restoration but have struggled to address these spatiotemporal variant distortions effectively. This paper proposes a new framework that combines geometric restoration with an enhancement module. Random perturbations and geometric distortion are removed using a pyramid architecture with deformable 3D convolutions, resulting in aligned frames. These frames are then used to reconstruct a sharp, clear image via a multi-scale architecture of 3D Swin Transformers. The proposed framework demonstrates superior performance over the state of the art for both synthetic and real atmospheric turbulence effects, with reasonable speed and model size.