Turb-Seg-Res: A Segment-then-Restore Pipeline for Dynamic Videos with Atmospheric Turbulence
Authors: Ripon Kumar Saha, Dehao Qin, Nianyi Li, Jinwei Ye, Suren Jayasuriya

Tackling image degradation due to atmospheric turbulence particularly in dynamic environments remains a challenge for long-range imaging systems. Existing techniques have been primarily designed for static scenes or scenes with small motion. This paper presents the first segment-then-restore pipeline for restoring the videos of dynamic scenes in turbulent environments. We leverage mean optical flow with an unsupervised motion segmentation method to separate dynamic and static scene components prior to restoration. After camera shake compensation and segmentation we introduce foreground/background enhancement leveraging the statistics of turbulence strength and a transformer model trained on a novel noise-based procedural turbulence generator for fast dataset augmentation. Benchmarked against existing restoration methods our approach restores most of the geometric distortion and enhances the sharpness of videos. We make our code simulator and data publicly available to advance the field of video restoration from turbulence: riponcs.github.io/TurbSegRes