Deep Learning for Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation: A Comparison Between GANs and Transformers

Atmospheric turbulence creates complex spatial and temporal distortions that significantly reduce image quality. This work compares two deep learning methods for turbulence reduction: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Transformer-based models. Both methods are trained and tested on the SOTIS dataset, which includes multi-frame sequences under different turbulence conditions with ground truth references. Our results show an important finding: GAN-based models perform better in severely degraded, low-quality situations, while Transformer-based models achieve better results in moderate to high-quality settings, especially in correcting geometric distortions. We also enhance the Turbulence Mitigation Transformer (TMT) by introducing a refined training strategy, an augmented input design that includes a temporally averaged frame as prior structural information, and a modified loss function that incorporates the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). These improvements lead to consistent performance gains across various turbulence conditions. Overall, this study provides an in-depth evaluation of deep learning methods for turbulence reduction and offers practical guidance for selecting models in different imaging environments.