Physically-Grounded Turbulence Mitigation with Frame-Shared Degradation Parameters

Dongxin Xie, Yan Huang, Yong Xu, Hui Ji; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 29919-29928

Atmospheric turbulence causes spatially varying distortion and blur in long-range imaging, making restoration highly challenging in real-world applications. Supervised methods rely on synthetic training data, whose simulated degradation often cannot faithfully reflect real turbulence. Existing unsupervised methods usually estimate degradation parameters for each frame independently, without exploiting the shared correlations among frames from the same scene. We propose TMFS, an optimization-based and physics-grounded method for unsupervised turbulence restoration. TMFS is based on a physically motivated tilt-then-blur degradation model and represents frame degradations through a shared turbulence structure. By decomposing the distortion and blur of each frame into a scene-shared correlation function and per-frame noise maps, TMFS enables cross-frame information sharing and alleviates the ill-posedness of framewise estimation. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TMFS and its strong generalization to real turbulence.