EvTurb: Event Camera Guided Turbulence Removal

TL;DR

EvTurb is a novel framework that uses event streams to effectively remove turbulence-induced blur and tilt distortions from images, improving image quality for computer vision applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces EvTurb, a new event-guided turbulence removal method that decouples blur and tilt effects using a two-step network and presents the first real turbulence dataset.

Findings

EvTurb outperforms existing methods in turbulence removal.

It maintains high computational efficiency.

The TurbEvent dataset enables better evaluation of turbulence removal techniques.

Abstract

Atmospheric turbulence degrades image quality by introducing blur and geometric tilt distortions, posing significant challenges to downstream computer vision tasks. Existing single-image and multi-frame methods struggle with the highly ill-posed nature of this problem due to the compositional complexity of turbulence-induced distortions. To address this, we propose EvTurb, an event guided turbulence removal framework that leverages high-speed event streams to decouple blur and tilt effects. EvTurb decouples blur and tilt effects by modeling event-based turbulence formation, specifically through a novel two-step event-guided network: event integrals are first employed to reduce blur in the coarse outputs. This is followed by employing a variance map, derived from raw event streams, to eliminate the tilt distortion for the refined outputs. Additionally, we present TurbEvent, the first real-captured dataset featuring diverse turbulence scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that EvTurb surpasses state-of-the-art methods while maintaining computational efficiency.