Deep learning image burst stacking to reconstruct high-resolution ground-based solar observations

Context. Large aperture ground-based solar telescopes allow the solar atmosphere to be resolved in unprecedented detail. However, ground-based observations are inherently limited due to Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, requiring image correction techniques. Aims. Recent post-image reconstruction techniques are based on using information from bursts of short-exposure images. Shortcomings of such approaches are the limited success, in case of stronger atmospheric seeing conditions, and computational demand. Real-time post-image reconstruction is of high importance to enabling automatic processing pipelines and accelerating scientific research. In an attempt to overcome these limitations, we provide a deep learning approach to reconstruct an original image burst into a single high-resolution high-quality image in real time. Methods. We present a novel deep learning tool for image burst reconstruction based on image stacking methods. Here, an image burst of 100 short-exposure observations is reconstructed to obtain a single high-resolution image. Our approach builds on unpaired image-to-image translation. We trained our neural network with seeing degraded image bursts and used speckle reconstructed observations as a reference. With the unpaired image translation, we aim to achieve a better generalization and increased robustness in case of increased image degradations. Results. We demonstrate that our deep learning model has the ability to effectively reconstruct an image burst in real time with an average of 0.5 s of processing time while providing similar results to standard reconstruction methods. We evaluated the results on an independent test set consisting of high- and low-quality speckle reconstructions. Our method shows an improved robustness in terms of perceptual quality, especially when speckle reconstruction methods show artifacts. An evaluation with a varying number of images per burst demonstrates that our method makes efficient use of the combined image information and achieves the best reconstructions when provided with the full-image burst.