Turbulent-image Restoration Based on a Compound Multibranch Feature Fusion Network

In middle- and long-distance imaging systems, due to the atmospheric turbulence caused by temperature, wind speed, humidity, and so on, light waves propagating in the air are distorted, resulting in image-quality degradation such as geometric deformation and fuzziness. In remote sensing, astronomical observation, and traffic monitoring, image information loss due to degradation causes huge losses, so effective restoration of degraded images is very important. To restore images degraded by atmospheric turbulence, an image-restoration method based on improved compound multibranch feature fusion (CMFNetPro) was proposed. Based on the CMFNet network, an efficient channel-attention mechanism was used to replace the channel-attention mechanism to improve image quality and network efficiency. In the experiment, two-dimensional random distortion vector fields were used to construct two turbulent datasets with different degrees of distortion, based on the Google Landmarks Dataset v2 dataset. The experimental results showed that compared to the CMFNet, DeblurGAN-v2, and MIMO-UNet models, the proposed CMFNetPro network achieves better performance in both quality and training cost of turbulent-image restoration. In the mixed training, CMFNetPro was 1.2391 dB (weak turbulence), 0.8602 dB (strong turbulence) respectively higher in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio and 0.0015 (weak turbulence), 0.0136 (strong turbulence) respectively higher in terms of structure similarity compared to CMFNet. CMFNetPro was 14.4 hours faster compared to the CMFNet. This provides a feasible scheme for turbulent-image restoration based on deep learning.