Investigation of Optical Flow Techniques for Extracting Non-Rigid Sea Surface Currents

摘要

This paper is about performance evaluation of two optical flow (OF) methods for extracting sea surface curved motions like eddies. By incorporating a simple matrix and its rotation in programming procedure, curved motion can be obtained. These two OF methods are Horn/Schunk and Lucas/Kanade. The Horn/Schunk method depends on a smoothness parameter (α) and when it changes, smoothness and reality change too. The Lucas/Kanade method is more complex than previous one. It depends on two parameters, smoothness parameter (Sigma) and window size (Win). Different values for Win and Sigma change smoothness and reality of the flows. Sea surface currents are extracted from two sequential sea surface temperature (SST) images by using OF methods. By using these methods and selecting the appropriate parameters like smoothness (for Horn/Schunk) and window size and smoothness (for Lucas/Kanade) extracting real flows or smooth flows are possible and investigated in this paper.