A Variational Stereo Method for the Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Ocean Waves

We develop a novel remote sensing technique for the observation of waves on the ocean surface. Our method infers the 3-D waveform and radiance of oceanic sea states via a variational stereo imagery formulation. In this setting, the shape and radiance of the wave surface are given by minimizers of a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing Vol. 49; no. 11; pp. 4445 - 4457
Main Authors Gallego, G., Yezzi, A., Fedele, F., Benetazzo, A.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, NY IEEE 01.11.2011
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Subjects
Applied geophysics
Cameras
Earth sciences
Earth, ocean, space
Exact sciences and technology
Image processing
Image reconstruction
Internal geophysics
marine technology
Mathematical model
remote sensing
Sea surface
stereo vision
Surface reconstruction
Surface treatment
Surface waves
variational methods
image processing
spectral analysis
remote sensing
technology
marine technology
matching
variational methods
currents
solution
imagery
wave dispersion
stereo vision
waveforms
ocean waves
theory
energy
radiance
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Summary:We develop a novel remote sensing technique for the observation of waves on the ocean surface. Our method infers the 3-D waveform and radiance of oceanic sea states via a variational stereo imagery formulation. In this setting, the shape and radiance of the wave surface are given by minimizers of a composite energy functional that combines a photometric matching term along with regularization terms involving the smoothness of the unknowns. The desired ocean surface shape and radiance are the solution of a system of coupled partial differential equations derived from the optimality conditions of the energy functional. The proposed method is naturally extended to study the spatiotemporal dynamics of ocean waves and applied to three sets of stereo video data. Statistical and spectral analysis are carried out. Our results provide evidence that the observed omnidirectional wavenumber spectrum S ( k ) decays as k -2.5 is in agreement with Zakharov's theory (1999). Furthermore, the 3-D spectrum of the reconstructed wave surface is exploited to estimate wave dispersion and currents.
ISSN:0196-2892
1558-0644
DOI:10.1109/TGRS.2011.2150230