Recognition of vortex structures in turbulent refractive index field using wavelet transformation

When the light wave propagates through the hypersonic flow field, the aero-optic distortion happens. It is necessary to recognize the vortex structure for studying the light propagation model. A new vortex structure recognition method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the refractive index field, which is transformed from the turbulent density field, is changed to gray scale images with abundant texture information equivalently. Then, wavelet transform is performed to decompose these images and the entropy values of the wavelet base coefficients are calculated. Comparing the entropy value to a given threshold, the modules with lower entropy are considered to be the large-scale vortex modules while those with higher entropy are small-scale vortex modules. The computer simulation results show that the proposed method is valid to recognize the vortex structures. This paper provides basis for investigation on the optics propagation model in terms of the turbulence vortex structures.