Abstract
This article presents a methodology for analyzing the Lagrangian structure of fluid flows generated by the evolution of cloud systems in meteorological multispectral image sequences. The correlation between the orientation of cloud texture and the underlying motion field Lagrangian component allows to adopt a static strategy. Following a scale-space approach, we therefore first construct a non-local robust estimator for the locally dominant orientation field in an image. This estimator, which is derived from the image structure tensor, is relevant in both mono- and multisprectral contexts. In a second step, the Lagrangian component of the flow is estimated over some bounded image region by robustly fitting a hierarchical vector parametric model to the dominant orientation field. Here, a recurrent problem deals with adaptating the geometry of the model support to obtain unbiased estimates. To tackle this classic issue, we introduce a novel variational, semi-parametric approach which allows the joint optimization of model parameters and support. This approach is generic and, in particular, can be readily applied to motion estimation yielding robust measurement of the Eulerian structure of the flow. Finally, a structural characterization of the reflecting vector field is derived by means of classic differential geometry techniques. This methodology is applied to the analysis of temperated latitude depressions in Meteosat images.
