# JDATT: A Joint Distillation Framework for Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation and Target Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19780 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19780/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13256/) (2020)
- [Masked Generative Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01529/) (2022)
- [Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Industries: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12391/) (2020)
- [Mamba3D: Enhancing Local Features for 3D Point Cloud Analysis via State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14966/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Atmospheric Turbulence Simulation via Learned Phase-to-Space Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11627/) (2021)
- [Single Frame Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation: A Benchmark Study and A New Physics-Inspired Transformer Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10040/) (2022)
- [LW-DETR: A Transformer Replacement to YOLO for Real-Time Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03459/) (2024)
- [AT-DDPM: Restoring Faces degraded by Atmospheric Turbulence using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11284/) (2022)
- [Imaging through the Atmosphere using Turbulence Mitigation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06465/) (2022)
- [Physics-Driven Turbulence Image Restoration with Stochastic Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10603/) (2023)
- [Spatio-Temporal Turbulence Mitigation: A Translational Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04244/) (2024)
- [Channel Distillation: Channel-Wise Attention for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01683/) (2020)
- [Atmospheric Turbulence Removal with Complex-Valued Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06989/) (2022)
- [ATFaceGAN: Single Face Image Restoration and Recognition from Atmospheric Turbulence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03119/) (2019)
- [Atmospheric turbulence removal using convolutional neural network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11350/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning Techniques for Atmospheric Turbulence Removal: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14587/) (2024)
- [Align-DETR: Enhancing End-to-end Object Detection with Aligned Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07527/) (2023)
- [MAMAT: 3D Mamba-Based Atmospheric Turbulence Removal and its Object Detection Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17700/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [OLiVES: An Outdoor Low-Light Video Benchmark for Enhancement and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20501/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Atmospheric turbulence (AT) introduces severe degradations, such as rippling, blur, and intensity fluctuations, that hinder both image quality and downstream vision tasks like target detection. While recent deep learning-based approaches have advanced AT mitigation using transformer and Mamba architectures, their high complexity and computational cost make them unsuitable for real-time applications, especially in resource-constrained settings such as remote surveillance. Moreover, the common practice of separating turbulence mitigation and object detection leads to inefficiencies and suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose JDATT, a Joint Distillation framework for Atmospheric Turbulence mitigation and Target detection. JDATT integrates state-of-the-art AT mitigation and detection modules and introduces a unified knowledge distillation strategy that compresses both components while minimizing performance loss. We employ a hybrid distillation scheme: feature-level distillation via Channel-Wise Distillation (CWD) and Masked Generative Distillation (MGD), and output-level distillation via Kullback-Leibler divergence. Experiments on synthetic and real-world turbulence datasets demonstrate that JDATT achieves superior visual restoration and detection accuracy while significantly reducing model size and inference time, making it well-suited for real-time deployment.