Blind Restoration of Atmospheric Turbulence-Degraded Images Based on Curriculum Learning

Atmospheric turbulence-degraded images in typical practical application scenarios are always disturbed by severe additive noise. Severe additive noise corrupts the prior assumptions of most baseline deconvolution methods. Existing methods either ignore the additive noise term during optimization or perform denoising and deblurring completely independently. However, their performances are not high because they do not conform to the prior that multiple degradation factors are tightly coupled. This paper proposes a Noise Suppression-based Restoration Network (NSRN) for turbulence-degraded images, in which the noise suppression module is designed to learn low-rank subspaces from turbulence-degraded images, the attention-based asymmetric U-NET module is designed for blurred-image deconvolution, and the Fine Deep Back-Projection (FDBP) module is used for multi-level feature fusion to reconstruct a sharp image. Furthermore, an improved curriculum learning strategy is proposed, which trains the network gradually to achieve superior performance through a local-to-global, easy-to-difficult learning method. Based on NSRN, we achieve state-of-the-art performance with PSNR of 30.1 dB and SSIM of 0.9 on the simulated dataset and better visual results on the real images.