Automatic Quantification of Atmospheric Turbulence Intensity in Space-Time Domain

Abstract

Quantifying atmospheric turbulence intensity is a challenging task, particularly when assessing real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a deep learning method for quantifying atmospheric turbulence intensity based on the space-time domain analysis from videos depicting different turbulence levels. We capture videos of a static image under controlled air turbulence intensities using an inexpensive camera, and then, by slicing these videos in the space-time domain, we extract spatio-temporal representations of the turbulence dynamics. These representations are then fed into a Convolutional Neural Network for classification. This network effectively learns to discriminate between different turbulence regimes based on the spatio-temporal features extracted from a real-world experiment captured in video slices.