Turbulence Compensation using Time-Varying Phase Diversity

To compensate for visual artifacts due to atmospheric turbulence is of key importance for the task of visual identification over long distances. In this paper we propose a new method to compensate the visual effects of turbulence, which makes identification possible over larger distances. Our method is based on applying phase diversity imaging by adaptive optics in free-running mode (without feedback loop), which enables us to compensate turbulence for multiple isoplanatic angles. Several known wave front aberrations are applied to each frame, which makes it possible to locally estimate the optimal wave front aberration and thus the optimal - turbulence free - image is known. In this paper experiments are described that show under which conditions our method is behaving well. Furthermore encouraging results on simulated data are presented