Physics Commons^™

Estimation Of Turbulence From Time-Lapse Imagery, Jack E. Mccrae, Santasri Bose-Pillai, Steven T. Fiorino

Faculty Publications

Atmospheric turbulence parameters are estimated for an imaging path based on time-lapse imaging results. Atmospheric turbulence causes frame-to-frame shifts of the entire image as well as parts of the image. The statistics of these shifts encode information about the turbulence strength (as characterized by Cn2, the refractive index structure function constant) along the optical path. The shift variance observed is simply proportional to the variance of the tilt of the optical field averaged over the area being tracked and averaged over the camera aperture. By presuming this turbulence follows the Kolmogorov spectrum, weighting functions, which relate the turbulence strength along …