Blind restoration of real turbulence-degraded image with complicated backgrounds using anisotropic regularization

This paper proposes a novel blind image restoration method based on estimating the point-spread functions by using two real turbulence-degraded images as input. The non-negative constraint and the spatial correlation are transformed mathematically into the penalty terms and added to the objective function. An anisotropic and nonlinear regularization function is proposed to adequately punish the differences of the point spread functions (PSFs) in the process of optimization estimation. Some definitions of weighted second-order differences are given and a fast method to construct the matrix of second-order weighted gradient operator is derived. The PSF values can be quickly estimated. With the estimated PSFs, the true images can be recovered by non-blind restoration methods. Experiment results for the restoration of real turbulence-degraded images with complicated backgrounds support the effectiveness of this proposed method. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.