Objective measurement of image degradation caused by optical transmission effects

An objective approach is proposed to measure the image degradation caused by optical transmission effects of atmospheric turbulence. Comparisons of the proposed measure with existing objective image quality measures are performed and the correlations between the measure and subjective ratings are quantified. Experiments on wind-tunnel images and simulated turbulence-degraded images produce good results. The proposed measure may serve as a complement to state-of-the-art measures in evaluating image degradation caused by turbulence. It can also be applied as a criterion for frame selection and iteration termination for iterative restoration algorithms or help evaluate the performances of image restoration algorithms.