Graphics processing unit restoration of non-uniformly warped images using a typical frame as prototype
Murat Tahtalı, Andrew J. Lambert, Donald J. Fraser · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
When imaging through the atmosphere, the resulting image contains not only the desired scene, but also the adverse effects of all the turbulent air mass between the camera and the scene. These effects are viewed as a combination of nonuniform blurring and random shifting of each point in the received short-exposure image. Corrections for both aspects of this combined distortion have been tackled reasonably successfully by previous efforts. We presented in an earlier paper a more robust method of restoring the geometry by redefining the place of the prototype frame and by reducing the adverse effect of averaging in the processing sequence. We present here a variant of this method using a Minimum Sum of Squared Differences (MSSD) cross-correlation registration algorithm implemented on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The raw speed-up achieved using GPU code is in the order of x1000. Two orders of magnitude speed-up on the complete algorithm will allow for better fine tuning of this method and for experimentation with various registration algorithms.