Shape Reconstruction from Multiple Images of the Ocean Surface

In many remote sensing applications the detailed shape of a water surface must be determined instantaneously, and under natural lighting conditions. Because of their nondestructive measurement capabilities, stereo image analysis methods seem to be ideally suited for this application. Most of these techniques, however, assume surface reflectance properties which are incompatible with the reflectance properties of water, especially for centimeter and smaller wave lengths. To analyze the fine scale structure of the ocean surface, a new technique (known as Specular Surface Stereo) is proposed that makes use of the unique optical properties of water. In this method, the surface shape is recovered by solving the inverse problem of finding a surface shape (defined by an elevation and gradient map) that results in a set of synthetic (computer generated) images that closely match a set of observed images. To accomplish this, the algorithm requires an image of the illumination source, three im..