Internal Wave Detection and Parameter Estimation from SAR Images Based on a Novel Radon Transform Method

The potential of using satellite imagery for studying oceanic internal waves have long recognized by the oceanographers and remote sensing researchers. A great deal can be learnt about internal waves from satellite data if the grey tone patterns of the Synthetic aperture radar images can be confirmed to correspond to the trough and crest patterns of internal waves. In this paper, a new solution of internal wave detection and parameter estimation in SAR ocean image is presented. It improves the traditional Radon transform through normalize the Radon coefficients in an ellipse region and thus detect the inconspicuous lines in ocean background. Making use of the idea of glide windows we use the proposed transform to detect the internal wave region, and then we can estimate the internal wave parameters, named the wave direction and the wavelength, simply through dealing with the Radon coefficients. The experiment results on simulation and real SAR images shows that the proposed method can detect the internal wave region automatically and correctly, and the parameter estimated is corresponding with the real observation.