Computational Imaging through Atmospheric Turbulence

Abstract: Long-range imaging is an important task for many civilian and military applications. However, when seeing through a long distance, the random effects of the atmosphere will cause severe distortions to the images. Since Andrey Kolmogorov (40s), Valerian Tatarski (50s), and David Fried (70s), the subject has been of significant interest to the optics and signal processing community. In this talk, we will give a tutorial-style overview of the subject and share some of the latest results our group has obtained. We will talk about (i) the forward image formation model of atmospheric turbulence, (ii) image reconstruction algorithms, (iii) wavefront estimation. Some of the materials we discuss here can be found in our recently published book Computational Imaging through Atmospheric Turbulence (Now Publisher, 2023), available online at https://nchimitt.github.io/book/

Bio: Stanley Chan is an Elmore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego in 2011, and did his postdoc at Harvard between 2012-2014. He does research in photon limited imaging and imaging through atmospheric turbulence. He is a recipient of the 2022 IEEE SPS Best Paper Award for his Plug-and-Play ADMM published in IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging in 2017, and a recipient of the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing Best Paper Award. He is the author of Introduction to Probability for Data Science https://probability4datascience.com/ (Michigan Publishing, 2021), published under University of Michigan’s Free EE Textbook Initiative.

Nick Chimitt is a research scientist at Purdue University. He received his PhD from Purdue in 2023, primarily working on imaging through turbulence. He is the co-inventor of the Zernike-based propagation-free atmospheric turbulence simulator and the phase-to-space transform. He is a co-author of the book Computational Imaging through Atmospheric Turbulence (Now Publisher, 2023). He has delivered tutorials at various conferences including CVPR and ICIP. He is also the organizer of the UG2+ workshop at CVPR 2024.