Date of Award
8-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Mathematics and Systems Engineering
First Advisor
William W. Arrasmith
Second Advisor
Steven Shaw
Third Advisor
Luis Daniel Otero
Fourth Advisor
Adrian M. Peter
Abstract
This dissertation advances the real-world implementation of the Well Optimized Linear Finder (WOLF) method for high-speed Atmospheric Turbulence Compensation (ATC). Atmospheric turbulence introduces phase aberrations into optical wavefronts and degrades image quality in terrestrial imaging systems. Traditional phase diversity methods are computationally intensive and poorly suited to real-time operation. The WOLF method addresses these limitations through a novel, point-wise formulation of the optical transfer function (OTF) as a structured autocorrelation of the generalized pupil function (GPF). This formulation enables the estimation of phase aberrations at individual spatial coordinates with distributed computational complexity.
The research begins by developing a MATLAB-based simulation framework using Fourier optics and atmospheric turbulence models with von Kármán statistics. It then establishes the mathematical structure of the WOLF method, including detailed indexing schemes for autocorrelation and discrete entrance pupil phase estimation. The significant contributions of this work are the parallel implementation of the WOLF method on GPU hardware using MATLAB GPU Coder and the successful image correction in the presence of von Kármán turbulence. The method exploits local independence across diagonals of the OTF, enabling scalable parallel execution.
Performance evaluation shows that GPU acceleration reduces execution time by a factor of approximately 80 relative to the serial CPU implementation, enabling reconstruction in a fraction of a second for practical imaging systems. The WOLF estimator maintains reconstruction accuracy while demonstrating feasibility for real-time compensation. The dissertation concludes with directions for future research, including continuous optimization methods and deployment on hardware-optimized platforms such as FPGAs. These results position the WOLF method as a strong candidate for real-time atmospheric turbulence correction in lightweight fielded optical systems.
Recommended Citation
Coon, Timothy Evan, "Advancing Real-World Implementation of the Well Optimized Linear Finder (WOLF) High-Speed Atmospheric Turbulence Compensation Method" (2025). Theses and Dissertations. 1573.
https://repository.fit.edu/etd/1573
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Comments
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