PlaNet: Learning to mitigate atmospheric turbulence in planetary images

Yifei Xia

Abstract: Obtaining planetary images with good visual quality is not an easy task since they are usually degenerated by atmospheric turbulence during the imaging procedure. Existing atmospheric turbulence mitigation methods designed for conventional images cannot be applied to planetary images, since the objects on the Earth have totally different degeneration patterns to planets. Besides, in planetary imaging, photographers often capture as many frames as possible to reduce the noise level of planetary images, which requires the method designed for planetary images to support an arbitrary number of input frames. In this paper, we propose a vertical distance-aware turbulence simulation pipeline to synthesize realistic planetary images in accordance with their unique degeneration patterns at a large scale with affordable computational cost, and design a neural network to mitigate the turbulence with flexible input frames by adopting an edge-based supervision strategy to handle the background scarcity issue. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world images.