Validation of atmospheric turbulence simulations of extended scenes
Kevin R. Leonard, Richard L. Espinola · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2014
Atmospheric turbulence causes blur, distortion and intensity fluctuations that can severely degrade image quality of electro-optic and thermal imaging systems. Realistic simulated imagery is needed to evaluate the effects of turbulence and provide input for the evaluation of mitigation and image processing algorithms, since turbulence-based data collections can be cost prohibitive and time consuming. In this work we validate an existing turbulence image simulator against a well-characterized dataset, including resolution targets. The robust dataset was collected through a diurnal cycle for a variety of ranges.