# Continuous Exposure-Time Modeling for Realistic Atmospheric Turbulence Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01398 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01398/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Simulating Anisoplanatic Turbulence by Sampling Inter-modal and Spatially Correlated Zernike Coefficients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11210/) (2020)
- [Physics-Driven Turbulence Image Restoration with Stochastic Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10603/) (2023)
- [Learning to restore images degraded by atmospheric turbulence using uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03447/) (2022)
- [Subsampled Turbulence Removal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04418/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Turbulence Mitigation: A Translational Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04244/) (2024)
- [LTT-GAN: Looking Through Turbulence by Inverting GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02379/) (2021)
- [Atmospheric Turbulence Removal with Complex-Valued Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06989/) (2022)
- [Restoration of Atmospheric Turbulence-distorted Images via RPCA and Quasiconformal Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03140/) (2017)
- [Tilt-then-Blur or Blur-then-Tilt? Clarifying the Atmospheric Turbulence Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06377/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Dense Field Phase-to-Space Simulation of Imaging through Atmospheric Turbulence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06713/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning Techniques for Atmospheric Turbulence Removal: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14587/) (2024)
- [Learning Phase Distortion with Selective State Space Models for Video Turbulence Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02697/) (2025)
- [Long-range Turbulence Mitigation: A Large-scale Dataset and A Coarse-to-fine Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08377/) (2024)
- [Open Turbulent Image Set (OTIS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22791/) (2024)
- [Coherent synthetic aperture imaging for visible remote sensing via reflective Fourier ptychography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00388/) (2020)

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

- [ASTRA-SR: Atmospheric Seeing and Turbulence Restoration for Astronomical Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26731/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Atmospheric turbulence significantly degrades long-range imaging by introducing geometric warping and exposure-time-dependent blur, which adversely affects both visual quality and the performance of high-level vision tasks. Existing methods for synthesizing turbulence effects often oversimplify the relationship between blur and exposure-time, typically assuming fixed or binary exposure settings. This leads to unrealistic synthetic data and limited generalization capability of trained models. To address this gap, we revisit the modulation transfer function (MTF) formulation and propose a novel Exposure-Time-dependent MTF (ET-MTF) that models blur as a continuous function of exposure-time. For blur synthesis, we derive a tilt-invariant point spread function (PSF) from the ET-MTF, which, when integrated with a spatially varying blur-width field, provides a comprehensive and physically accurate characterization of turbulence-induced blur. Building on this synthesis pipeline, we construct ET-Turb, a large-scale synthetic turbulence dataset that explicitly incorporates continuous exposure-time modeling across diverse optical and atmospheric conditions. The dataset comprises 5,083 videos (2,005,835 frames), partitioned into 3,988 training and 1,095 test videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained on ET-Turb produce more realistic restorations and achieve superior generalization on real-world turbulence data compared to those trained on other datasets. The dataset is publicly available at: github.com/Jun-Wei-Zeng/ET-Turb.