# Deep Learning Techniques for Atmospheric Turbulence Removal: A Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14587 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14587/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 144 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [ILVR: Conditioning Method for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02938/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Image Restoration Using Denoising Diffusion Null-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00490/) (2022)
- [Noise2Noise: Learning Image Restoration without Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04189/) (2018)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [Noise2Void - Learning Denoising from Single Noisy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10980/) (2018)
- [Noise2Self: Blind Denoising by Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11365/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Deep Generative Prior for Versatile Image Restoration and Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13659/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning on Image Denoising: An overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13171/) (2019)
- [Parallel Diffusion Models of Operator and Image for Blind Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10656/) (2022)
- [Swin3D: A Pretrained Transformer Backbone for 3D Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06906/) (2023)
- [Blind Video Temporal Consistency via Deep Video Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11838/) (2020)
- [Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Industries: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12391/) (2020)
- [Expanding Accurate Person Recognition to New Altitudes and Ranges: The BRIAR Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01917/) (2022)
- [Accelerating Atmospheric Turbulence Simulation via Learned Phase-to-Space Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11627/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [MAMAT: 3D Mamba-Based Atmospheric Turbulence Removal and its Object Detection Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17700/) (2025)
- [Advances in Artificial Intelligence: A Review for the Creative Industries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02725/) (2025)
- [DMAT: An End-to-End Framework for Joint Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation and Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04323/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Methods for Video Quality Improvement: A Survey of Restoration and Enhancement Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08375/) (2025)
- [JDATT: A Joint Distillation Framework for Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation and Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19780/) (2025)
- [RMFAT: Recurrent Multi-scale Feature Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11409/) (2025)
- [Continuous Exposure-Time Modeling for Realistic Atmospheric Turbulence Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01398/) (2026)
- [Active Convolved Illumination with Deep Transfer Learning for Complex Beam Transmission through Atmospheric Turbulence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19540/) (2025)
- [High-Quality and Efficient Turbulence Mitigation with Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20708/) (2026)
- [ReMATF: Recurrent Motion-Adaptive Multi-scale Turbulence Mitigation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21440/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The influence of atmospheric turbulence on acquired imagery makes image interpretation and scene analysis extremely difficult and reduces the effectiveness of conventional approaches for classifying and tracking objects of interest in the scene. Restoring a scene distorted by atmospheric turbulence is also a challenging problem. The effect, which is caused by random, spatially varying perturbations, makes conventional model-based approaches difficult and, in most cases, impractical due to complexity and memory requirements. Deep learning approaches offer faster operation and are capable of implementation on small devices. This paper reviews the characteristics of atmospheric turbulence and its impact on acquired imagery. It compares the performance of various state-of-the-art deep neural networks, including Transformers, SWIN and Mamba, when used to mitigate spatio-temporal image distortions.