Model-free prediction of atmospheric warp based on artificial neural network

This paper presents the application of artificial neural network for predicting the warping of images of remote objects or scenes ahead of time. The algorithm is based on estimating the pattern of warping of previously captured short-exposure frames through a generalized regression neural network (GRNN) and then predicting the warping of the upcoming frame. A high-accuracy optical flow technique is employed to estimate the dense motion fields of the captured frames, which are considered as training data for the GRNN. The proposed approach is independent of the pixel-oscillatory model unlike the state-of-the-art Kalman filter (KF) approach. Simulation experiments on synthetic and real-world turbulence degraded videos show that the proposed GRNN-based approach performs better than the KF approach in atmospheric warp prediction.