Wave Scale, Speed and Direction from Airborne Video of Maritime Scene

Abstract

Ocean surfaces and large water bodies are commonly monitored by aircraft. While water features are visually non-static, they do include information that allows determination of water motion which has applications in navigation, assessing sub-surface changes and the estimation of drift and size of objects within the scene. This study presents an enhancement of state of the art methods to extract water surface features from imagery acquired by an overhead aircraft and assesses its performance on a real world maritime scene.