Mitigation of Atmospheric Effects on Imaging Systems

Abstract

Atmospheric effects such as refractive turbulence and aerosol obscuration can seriously degrade the performance of military optical systems. A complete understanding of these effects is therefore essential for optimizing the design of such systems, and it is also necessary for developing mitigation techniques. The project described here was a three-year theoretical and experimental investigation to develop and validate a physical understanding of several atmospheric effects that are important for current and future Army optical systems. a) An investigation of turbulence-induced waviness in images of edges, and techniques for its mitigation. b) An investigation of the degradation of optical images by atmospheric turbulence and a validation of the predicted dependence of the atmospheric Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) on the inner scale of turbulence.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 31, 2004
Accession Number
ADA422695

Entities

People

  • Gary G. Gimmestad
  • Mikhail S. Belen'kii

Organizations

  • Georgia Tech Research Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Sensors
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Data Analysis
  • Data Sets
  • Degradation
  • Detectors
  • Digital Data
  • Frequency
  • Frequency Domain
  • Image Processing
  • Images
  • Lasers
  • Measurement
  • Optical Images
  • Refractive Index
  • Tactical High-Energy Lasers
  • Transfer Functions
  • Turbulence
  • Visible Spectra

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Aerosol Science/Aerosol Physics
  • Atmospheric Science / Meteorology, specifically Wind Wave Turbulence.
  • Systems Analysis and Design