ATCOM: accelerated image processing for terrestrial long-range imaging through atmospheric effects

Long-range video surveillance performance is often severely diminished due to atmospheric turbulence. The larger apertures typically used for video-rate operation at long-range are particularly susceptible to scintillation and blurring effects that limit the overall diffraction efficiency and resolution. In this paper, we present research progress made toward a digital signal processing technique which aims to mitigate the effects of turbulence in real-time. Our previous work in this area focused on an embedded implementation for portable applications. Our more recent research has focused on functional enhancements to the same algorithm using general-purpose hardware. We present some techniques that were successfully employed to accelerate processing of high-definition color video streams and study performance under non-ideal conditions involving moving objects and panning cameras. Finally, we compare the real-time performance of two implementations using a CPU and a GPU.