Dynamic simulation imaging for complex atmospheric turbulence scenes based on atmospheric coherence length and associated with phase structure function

Atmospheric turbulence disturbance degrades the quality of long-range image transmission in applications such as marine monitoring and satellite imaging. Simulating an atmospheric turbulence image dataset facilitates the correction of turbulence-distorted images. However, the current simulation algorithms suffer from long computation times, undersampling of frequency, and unrealistic turbulence image simulation. Therefore, we propose an algorithm based on atmospheric coherence length r₀ and associated with the phase structure function for fast, high-precision, and realistic simulation of atmospheric turbulence images. This solution demonstrates strong performance in pixel displacement correlation, phase structure function, and long-exposure and short-exposure point spread functions (PSFs). The results show that the fitting accuracies between the long-exposure and short-exposure PSFs, which reflect the imaging quality of the simulated turbulence image and the theoretical curve are 0.99 and 0.98, respectively, when the r₀ is 0.1 m. The fitting efficiency is high and closely aligns with the theoretical trends of atmospheric turbulence.