A Novel Method to Retrieve Sea Wave Components from Radar Image Sequence

In this paper, we consider retrieving individual wave components in a multi-directional sea wave model. To solve this problem, a currently and commonly used method is three-dimensional fast Fourier transform (3D FFT), which is based on the uniform frequency and the uniform wave number in wave number frequency domain. However, these uniformly sampling properties do not normally strictly satisfy the dispersion relation because of the limited analysis area selected from radar image sequence and as a result, the 3D FFT method incurs undesirable error performance. By deeply investigating the data structure, we obtain a new and decomposable matrix representation for processing the wave components and then, a novel iterative method is proposed to efficiently and effectively extract individual wave components, whose frequency and wave number rigorously satisfy the dispersion relation. Computer simulations show that our proposed new method always has better performance for retrieving ocean wave components from radar image sequences than the 3D FFT method.