Estimation of modified Zernike coefficients from turbulence-degraded multispectral imagery using deep learning

We investigate how wavelength diversity affects the performance of a deep-learning model that predicts the modified Zernike coefficients of turbulence-induced wavefront error from multispectral images. The ability to perform accurate predictions of the coefficients from images collected in turbulent conditions has potential applications in image restoration. The source images for this work were a point object and extended objects taken from a character-based dataset, and a wavelength-dependent simulation was developed that applies the effects of isoplanatic atmospheric turbulence to the images. The simulation utilizes a phase screen resampling technique to emulate the simultaneous collection of each band of a multispectral image through the same turbulence realization. Simulated image data were generated for the point and extended objects at various turbulence levels, and a deep neural network architecture based on AlexNet was used to predict the modified Zernike coefficients. Mean squared error results demonstrate a significant improvement in predicting modified Zernike coefficients for both the point object and extended objects as the number of spectral bands is increased. However, the improvement with the number of bands was limited when using extended objects with additive noise.