Deep Learning for Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation: A Comparison Between GANs and Transformers

Atmospheric turbulence causes significant image degradation due to pixel displacement (tilt) and blur, particularly in long-range imaging applications. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for atmospheric turbulence mitigation, GSTurb, which integrates optical flow-guided tilt correction and Gaussian splatting for modeling non-isoplanatic blur. The framework employs Gaussian parameters to represent tilt and blur, and optimizes them across multiple frames to enhance restoration. Experimental results on the ATSyn-static dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a peak PSNR of 27.67 dB and SSIM of 0.8735. Compared to the state-of-the-art method, GSTurb improves PSNR by 1.3 dB (a 4.5% increase) and SSIM by 0.048 (a 5.8% increase). Additionally, on real datasets, including the TSRWGAN Real-World and CLEAR datasets, GSTurb outperforms existing methods, showing significant improvements in both qualitative and quantitative performance. These results highlight that combining optical flow-guided tilt correction with Gaussian splatting effectively enhances image restoration under both synthetic and real-world turbulence conditions. The code for this method will be available at https://github.com/DuhlLiamz/3DGS_turbulence/tree/main.

Single-frame atmospheric turbulence mitigation is inherently ill-posed due to spatially varying blur coupled with non-rigid geometric distortion. Existing end-to-end approaches trained on flat-field simulations often struggle to balance texture recovery with geometric rectification. To overcome this limitation, we propose D$^2$Turb, a unified framework that bridges physics-grounded simulation with explicitly decoupled restoration. First, we introduce a Depth-Aware Turbulence Synthesis protocol that incorporates scene depth into the phase-to-space formulation. This generates physically consistent, depth-dependent degradations and provides a crucial intermediate tilt supervision signal for disentangled learning. Building upon this simulation engine, D$^2$Turb decomposes restoration into two interactive stages: texture deblurring and geometric rectification. The texture deblurring stage employs a deblurring backbone to recover fine-grained details while preserving geometric distortion for the subsequent rectification stage. To mitigate the information fragmentation commonly observed in cascaded designs, we further propose an Adaptive Structural Prior Injection (ASPI) mechanism that dynamically transfers deep structural representations from the deblurring module to guide dense flow prediction for spatial unwarping. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D$^2$Turb achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets, with consistent improvements in both texture recovery and geometric fidelity. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/HertzDot222/D2Turb.

Atmospheric turbulence severely degrades video quality by introducing distortions such as geometric warping, blur, and temporal flickering, posing significant challenges to both visual clarity and temporal consistency. Current state-of-the-art methods are based on transformer, 3D architectures and require multi-frame input, but their large computational cost and memory usage limit real-time deployment, especially in resource-constrained scenarios. In this work, we propose ReMATF, a lightweight recurrent framework that restores videos using only two frames at a time while preserving spatial detail and temporal stability. ReMATF combines a multi-scale encoder-decoder with temporal warping and a motion-adaptive temporal fusion module that performs per-pixel fusion between the warped previous output and the current prediction to enhance coherence without enlarging the temporal window. This design reduces flicker, sharpens details, and remains efficient. Experiments on synthetic and real turbulence datasets show consistent improvements in PSNR/SSIM and perceptual quality (LPIPS), along with substantially faster inference than multi-frame transformer baselines, making ReMATF suitable turbulence mitigation in resource-constrained scenarios.