Mechanism of information degradation in observations through a randomly inhomogeneous medium

Abstract

The reasons for degrading the quality of an object image during its observation through a medium with randomly inhomogeneous refraction index are discussed. The information degradation mechanism impacted by phase distortions is described in detail. The earlier proposed methods for attaining diffraction limit of an instrument are briefly outlined. The reasons why the efficiency of such methods is lost in the mean-square deviation of phase distortions of 2π and more are studied. A method for overcoming this limitation is proposed.