Deblurring Turbulent Images via Maximizing L1 Regularization

Atmospheric turbulence significantly degrades image quality. A blind image deblurring algorithm is needed, and a favorable image prior is the key to solving this problem. However, the general sparse priors support blurry images instead of explicit images, so the details of the restored images are lost. The recently developed priors are non-convex, resulting in complex and heuristic optimization. To handle these problems, we first propose a convex image prior; namely, maximizing L1 regularization (ML1). Benefiting from the symmetrybetween ML1 and L1 regularization, the ML1 supports clear images and preserves the image edges better. Then, a novel soft suppression strategy is designed for the deblurring algorithm to inhibit artifacts. A coarse-to-fine scheme and a non-blind algorithm are also constructed. For qualitative comparison, a turbulent blur dataset is built. Experiments on this dataset and real images demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to other state-of-the-art methods in blindly recovering turbulent images.