A hybrid method for surface current estimation using X-band nautical radar

In this paper, a new method is proposed to estimate surface current using X-band nautical radar. This method is referred to as the Hybrid Least Squares (HLS) method. The HLS combines the existing Iterative Least Squares (ILS) and Normalized Scalar Product (NSP) methods. The HLS is designed to inherit the short ILS computational time and the high NSP reliability. For validation, the proposed method was applied on a number of simulated X-band nautical radar image sets. Results have shown that the HLS produces accurate estimates while maintaining very short computational time.