Semi-supervised correction model for turbulence-distorted images

Significant progress has been made in addressing turbulence distortion in recent years, but persistent challenges remain. Firstly, existing methods heavily rely on fully supervised optimization strategies and synthetic datasets, posing difficulties in effectively utilizing unlabeled real data for training. Secondly, most approaches construct networks in a straightforward manner, overlooking the representation model of phase distortion and point spread function (PSF) in spatial and channel dimensions. This oversight restricts the potential for distortion correction. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a semi-supervised atmospheric turbulence correction method based on the mean-teacher framework. Our approach imposes constraints on the unlabeled data of student networks using pseudo-labels generated by teacher networks, thereby enhancing the generalization ability by leveraging information from unlabeled data. Furthermore, we introduce to use no-reference image quality assessment criterion to select the most reliable pseudo-label for each unlabeled sample by predicting physical parameters that indicating the level of degradation. Additionally, we propose to combine sliding window-based self-attention with channel attention to facilitate local-global context interaction. This design is inspired by the representation of phase distortion and PSF, which can be characterized by coefficients and basis functions corresponding to the channel-wise representation of convolutional neural network features. Moreover, the base functions exhibit spatial correlation, akin to Zenike and Airy disks. Experimental results show that the proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art models.