Dynamic simulation imaging for complex atmospheric turbulence scenes based on atmospheric coherence length and associated with phase structure function.

Atmospheric turbulence disturbance degrades the quality of long-range image transmission in applications such as marine monitoring and satellite imaging. Simulating an atmospheric turbulence image dataset facilitates the correction of turbulence-distorted images. However, the current simulation algorithms suffer from long computation times, undersampling of frequency, and unrealistic turbulence image simulation. Therefore, we propose an algorithm based on atmospheric coherence length and associated with the phase structure function for fast, high-precision, and realistic simulation of atmospheric turbulence images. This solution demonstrates strong performance in pixel displacement correlation, phase structure function, and long-exposure and short-exposure point spread functions (PSFs). The results show that the fitting accuracies between the long-exposure and short-exposure PSFs, which reflect the imaging quality of the simulated turbulence image and the theoretical curve are 0.99 and 0.98, respectively, when the is 0.1 m. The fitting efficiency is high and closely aligns with the theoretical trends of atmospheric turbulence.