# D2Turb: Depth-Aware Simulation and Decoupled Learning for Single-Frame Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27460 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27460/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2026.

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

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [GMFlow: Learning Optical Flow via Global Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13680/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer with Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00520/) (2022)
- [AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14614/) (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)
- [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)
- [Spatio-Temporal Turbulence Mitigation: A Translational Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04244/) (2024)
- [Long-range Turbulence Mitigation: A Large-scale Dataset and A Coarse-to-fine Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08377/) (2024)
- [EvTurb: Event Camera Guided Turbulence Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10582/) (2025)
- [EGTM: Event-guided Efficient Turbulence Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03808/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single-frame atmospheric turbulence mitigation is inherently ill-posed due to spatially varying blur coupled with non-rigid geometric distortion. Existing end-to-end approaches trained on flat-field simulations often struggle to balance texture recovery with geometric rectification. To overcome this limitation, we propose D2Turb, a unified framework that bridges physics-grounded simulation with explicitly decoupled restoration. First, we introduce a Depth-Aware Turbulence Synthesis protocol that incorporates scene depth into the phase-to-space formulation. This generates physically consistent, depth-dependent degradations and provides a crucial intermediate tilt supervision signal for disentangled learning. Building upon this simulation engine, D2Turb decomposes restoration into two interactive stages: texture deblurring and geometric rectification. The texture deblurring stage employs a deblurring backbone to recover fine-grained details while preserving geometric distortion for the subsequent rectification stage. To mitigate the information fragmentation commonly observed in cascaded designs, we further propose an Adaptive Structural Prior Injection (ASPI) mechanism that dynamically transfers deep structural representations from the deblurring module to guide dense flow prediction for spatial unwarping. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D2Turb achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets, with consistent improvements in both texture recovery and geometric fidelity. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/HertzDot222/D2Turb.