Modeling and simulation of multispectral imaging through anisoplanatic atmospheric optical turbulence

Abstract

We explore the modeling and simulation of multispectral imaging through anisoplanatic atmospheric optical turbulence. We analyze the impact of wavelength on a number of key atmospheric optical turbulence statistics. This includes the impact of wavelength on tilt and tilt variance. The modeling analysis also includes the impact of wavelength on the atmospheric optical transfer function. Here, we investigate the balance between diffraction and turbulence degradation as a function of wavelength. We also present a method for simulating atmospheric degradation for multispectral imagery using numerical wave propagation. Our approach uses a phase screen resampling method to allow for modeling the same atmospheric realization but with sampling parameters tailored to each wavelength. A number of multispectral simulation results, along with a validation study that compares the empirical statistics from the simulation to their theoretical counterparts, are presented. Real image data are also studied to validate theoretical multispectral tilt statistics.