TOPOGRAPHIC-BASED FEATURE LABELING FOR INFRARED OCEANOGRAPHIC IMAGES

A general computational framework is proposed to address the problem of labeling oceanographic images. The essential ideas stem from fitting a bicubic polynomial to each pixel's neighborhood and assigning topological labels based on the first and second directional derivatives of the polynomial surface. The topographic approach has been successfully applied by numerous previous investigators to other problems. The motivation of our work is to build a complete autonomous and self-contained module that segments and labels oceanographic images. In this paper, the relationship between the oceanographic features in infrared satellite imagery and the topographic structures is presented. Algorithms are developed that demonstrate the ability to locate and identify the North and South Walls of the Gulf Stream and to find approximate centers of warm and cold eddies. Experimental results on detecting these oceanographic features are provided.