Diffeomorphic Template Registration for Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation

Dong Lao, Congli Wang, Alex Wong, Stefano Soatto; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 25107-25116

We describe a method for recovering the irradiance underlying a collection of images corrupted by atmospheric turbulence. Since supervised data is often technically impossible to obtain assumptions and biases have to be imposed to solve this inverse problem and we choose to model them explicitly. Rather than initializing a latent irradiance ("template") by heuristics to estimate deformation we select one of the images as a reference and model the deformation in this image by the aggregation of the optical flow from it to other images exploiting a prior imposed by Central Limit Theorem. Then with a novel flow inversion module the model registers each image TO the template but WITHOUT the template avoiding artifacts related to poor template initialization. To illustrate the robustness of the method we simply (i) select the first frame as the reference and (ii) use the simplest optical flow to estimate the warpings yet the improvement in registration is decisive in the final reconstruction as we achieve state-of-the-art performance despite its simplicity. The method establishes a strong baseline that can be further improved by integrating it seamlessly into more sophisticated pipelines or with domain-specific methods if so desired.