M. Lybanon, MALTESE FRONT VARIABILITY FROM SATELLITE-OBSERVATIONS BASED ON AUTOMATED DETECTION, IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing, 34(5), 1996, pp. 1159-1165
Maltese Front location statistics are obtained from multichannel sea-s
urface temperature (MCSST) images, derived from Advanced Very High Res
olution Radiometer (AVHRR) observations of the Mediterranean Sea durin
g March 3 through September 27, 1993, The statistics are based on semi
automated determinations of the Front's sea-surface temperature surfac
e expression, Expert analyses from the Naval Oceanographic Office give
an accuracy check, Expert techniques are largely manual, labor-intens
ive, subjective, and skill-dependent; therefore, automation could be b
eneficial. A mathematical morphology-based method successfully delinea
tes the Front. it finds the temperature gradients most likely to be th
e Front's and presents the corresponding segmentations to the operator
. The method was developed to find stars in astronomical images, and h
as successfully analyzed solar magnetograms and satellite Gulf Stream
images, Rings, fronts, and sunspots are not star-like, but simple prep
rocessing adapts the technique to these problem domains, This work con
stitutes another successful application, The success in ''moving'' the
technique is encouraging, The Maltese Front's thermal gradients are 5
-10 times weaker than the Gulf Stream North Wall's, yet the method pro
duces useful results, and it may work in other regions.