Mitigation of Atmospheric Effects on Imaging Systems

Atmospheric effects such as refractive turbulence and aerosol obscuration can seriously degrade the performance of military optical systems. A complete understanding of these effects is therefore essential for optimizing the design of such systems, and it is also necessary for developing mitigation techniques. The project described here was a three-year theoretical and experimental investigation to develop and validate a physical understanding of several atmospheric effects that are important for current and future Army optical systems. a) An investigation of turbulence-induced waviness in images of edges, and techniques for its mitigation. b) An investigation of the degradation of optical images by atmospheric turbulence and a validation of the predicted dependence of the atmospheric Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) on the inner scale of turbulence. The original document contains color images. Prepared in cooperation with Trex Enterprises, San Diego, CA.