Patent ID: 8509489
Filing Date: 2013-08-13
Classification: G01C,G01S

Abstract:
1. A computer based method for estimating surface velocity based on a time series of at least two images of a same portion of the ocean surface, with a heat equation having unknown parameters being a heat source term, an x-component of the surface velocity, and a y-component of the surface velocity, the method comprising: assigning a pattern of sub-arrays with a number of pixels in each sub-array, the number of pixels in each sub-array being at least as large as the product of the number of unknown parameters in the heat equation times the number of corner pixels in each sub-array; wherein for each sub-array, the unknown parameters for each interior pixel are defined using bilinear interpolation based on the adjacent corner pixels; and using linear regression to solve for the unknown parameters u, v, and s for each corner pixel by minimizing total error of the heat equation in finite difference form at all pixels, wherein u is the x-component of the surface velocity, v is the y-component of the surface velocity, and s is the heat source term.