Abstract
Tsunamis are some of the most destructive natural disasters. Some proposed tsunami measurement and arrival prediction systems use a limited number of instruments, then judge the occurrence of the tsunami, forecast its arrival time, location and scale. Since there are a limited number of measurement instruments, there is a possibility that large prediction errors will occur. In order to solve this problem, a long-distance tsunami measurement system based on the binocular stereo vision principle is proposed in this paper. The measuring range is 4–20 km away from the system deployment site. In this paper, we will focus on describing the stereo matching method for the proposed system. This paper proposes a two-step matching method. It first performs fast sparse matching, and then complete high precision dense matching based on the results of the sparse matching. A matching descriptor based on the physical features of sea waves is proposed to solve the matching difficulty caused by the similarity of sea surface image textures. The relationship between disparity and the y coordinate is built to reduce the matching search range. Experiments were conducted on sea surface images with different shooting times and distances; the results verify the effectiveness of the presented method.
Highlights
The tsunami warning systems operated by the Tsunami Warning Center in the UnitedStates rely on teleseismic measurements [1,2]
We find that the RANSAC+SURF algorithm can generate stable and correct matching results only within the region where features are obvious and distinctive, such as mountains or large size sea waves
We know that the wavelength of a tsunami wave is very long and usually the increase of sea surface height is small in the place where the tsunami occurs
Summary
The tsunami warning systems operated by the Tsunami Warning Center in the UnitedStates rely on teleseismic measurements [1,2]. The submarine cable system in Japan inputs the earthquake magnitude and hypocenter into pre-built simulation models to execute a tsunami warning [3,4]. Three minutes after the earthquake happened, the earliest tsunami warning predicted that in the Iwate Prefecture the sea level height on shore would reach 3 m, but post-tsunami surveys showed that the average wave height was up to 11.8 m [5]. The German–Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System takes an “end-to-end” approach to cover the complete tsunami warning chain; its working mechanism is similar to the submarine cable system and the Tsunami Warning systems in India and Australia [6,7,8]. A much more small-scale and flexible tsunami stereo measurement system is proposed; it scans the sea surface to increase measurement coverage and aims to measure sea level height in real time within its coverage area
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