Image restoration algorithms for atmospheric turbulence are known to be much
more challenging to design than traditional ones such as blur or noise because
the distortion caused by the turbulence is an entanglement of spatially varying
blur, geometric distortion, and sensor noise. Existing CNN-based restoration
methods built upon convolutional kernels with static weights are insufficient
to handle the spatially dynamical atmospheric turbulence effect. To address
this problem, in this paper, we propose a physics-inspired transformer model
for imaging through atmospheric turbulence. The proposed network utilizes the
power of transformer blocks to jointly extract a dynamical turbulence
distortion map and restore a turbulence-free image. In addition, recognizing
the lack of a comprehensive dataset, we collect and present two new real-world
turbulence datasets that allow for evaluation with both classical objective
metrics (e.g., PSNR and SSIM) and a new task-driven metric using text
recognition accuracy. Both real testing sets and all related code will be made
publicly available.

本研究提出了一种基于物理启发的转换器模型来处理大气湍流引起的图像失真，利用该模型可以提取动态湍流失真图并恢复无失真图像，并收集了两个现实世界的湍流数据集，用经典数据和一种新的任务驱动度量来进行评估。