Enhancing Atmospheric Turbulence Phase Screen Generation with an Improved Diffusion Model and U-Net Noise Generation Network

Simulating atmospheric turbulence phase screens is essential for optical system research and turbulence compensation. Traditional methods, such as multi-harmonic power spectrum inversion and Zernike polynomial fitting, often suffer from sampling errors and limited diversity. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes an improved denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) for generating high-fidelity atmospheric turbulence phase screens. The model effectively captures the statistical distribution of turbulence phase screens using small training datasets. A refined loss function incorporating the structure function enhances accuracy. Additionally, a self-attention module strengthens the model’s ability to learn phase screen features. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly reduces the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) from 154.45 to 59.80, with the mean loss stabilizing around 0.1 after 50,000 iterations. The generated phase screens exhibit high precision and diversity, providing an efficient and adaptable solution for atmospheric turbulence simulation.