Would be very useful to be able to compensate for the loss of sharpness due to heat convection / atmospheric conditions. These types of aberrations are typical in wildlife photography, especially over the body of water, or even able the grasslands.
I see there’s an old paper that discusses some considerations online (at least for video) - wonder what implications for current day still image sharpening models (if any).
Long range imaging systems that capture video through the atmosphere face a major problem in the form of atmospheric turbulence. This turbulence causes a phenomenon called heat shimmer which appears as a blurring and a wavering geometric distortion of the target scene which limits the effective range of the imaging system.
We explore an image processing approach to mitigating the blurring effect of this distortion by using a blind deconvolution technique to sharpen the video signal and a dynamic illuminance-reflectance correction technique to improve the signal’s contrast. The algorithm is implemented on a Graphics Processing Unit to achieve near real-time performance.