Anisoplanatic imaging through turbulent media: image, recovery by local information fusion from a set of short-exposure images

A wide-field-of-view white-light imaging experiment with artificially gener ated turbulence layers located between the extended object and the imaging system is described. Relocation of the turbulence sources along the imaging path allowed the creation of controllable anisoplanatic effects. We demons trate that the recently proposed synthetic imaging technique [J. Opt. Sec. Am. A 16, 1623 (1999)] may result in substantial improvement in image quali ty for highly anisoplanatic conditions. It is shown that for multisource ob jects located at different distances the processing of turbulence-degraded short-exposure images may lead to a synthetic image that has an image quali ty superior to that of the undistorted image obtained in the absence of tur bulence (turbulence-induced image quality enhancement). (C) 2001 Optical So ciety of America.