Ocean internal waves features extraction by analysis of aerial oblique photography

Internal waves are a widespread geophysical phenomenon in stratified fluids and studying internal features in the coastal ocean is an important task. Using satellite imagery for studying oceanic internal waves is very popular and studying the low altitude aerial oblique photograph is a new direction. In this paper, we study the images captured from a circling aircraft which track a number of internal wave packets. The captured images are first rectified and photogram metrically mapped to ground coordinates, and then we use canny edge detector to find the internal wave propagation direction. The first several waves' ridges of each ground coordinated images are also exactly labeled and propagation speeds can be achieved. Experiment results show the performance of our algorithms.