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 generated 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 demonstrate that the recently proposed synthetic imaging technique [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A16, 1623 (1999)] may result in substantial improvement in image quality for highly anisoplanatic conditions. It is shown that for multisource objects located at different distances the processing of turbulence-degraded short-exposure images may lead to a synthetic image that has an image quality superior to that of the undistorted image obtained in the absence of turbulence (turbulence-induced image quality enhancement).