A Method for Retrieving Wave Parameters From Synthetic X-Band Marine Radar Images

The research on retrieving wave parameters from X-band marine radar images based on the spectral analysis method is investigated in this paper. Since the sea wave field is not always homogeneous and stationary in the spatial and temporal domain, especially in the coastal shallow water area, the two-dimensional continuous wavelet transform (2D CWT) is currently utilized to retrieve wave spectrum and wave parameters for improving the inversion accuracy. Although the wavelet is concentrated around the given wavenumber, the CWT of the original image is spread out over a region. By deeply investigating the CWT and its application on radar image, a novel method based on the synchrosqueezed wavelet transform (SWT) is proposed to effectively extract wave parameters from the radar images. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified based on the simulated radar image. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SWT method has better performance than the traditional three-dimensional fast Fourier transform (3D FFT) method and the wavelet-based method for retrieving wave height. The performance of retrieving wave direction and wave period is close to that of both the 3D FFT-based method and the CWT-based method.