Digital Adaptive Optical Imaging for Oceanic Turbulence Mitigation

Digital Adaptive Optics enabled by homodyne encoding can mitigate oceanic turbulence in a passive imaging system. This effort demonstrates self-referencing homodyne interferometry that combines the passive imaging of multi-frame algorithm procedures with the single-frame correction capability of Shack-Hartmann adaptive optics techniques. By imaging QR Codes through a turbulent tank of clear water in the laboratory, we quantified the machine-readable performance gain provided by Digital Adaptive Optics when compared to a standard imaging camera. This work also presents temporal motion-compensation techniques to further improve image detection and pattern recognition. Results from this work verify that Digital Adaptive Optics with homodyne encoding provides ocean optical turbulence mitigation for single frames of data, paving the way for high-speed, self-contained imaging systems.