SPACE-TIME INTERPOLATION OF OCEANIC FRONTS

Oceanic temperature fronts observed through composite infrared images from the AVHRR satellite data are fragmented due mostly to cloud occlu sion. The sampling frequency of such frontal position observations ten ds to be insufficiently high to resolve dynamics of the meandering fea tures associated with the frontal contour, so that contour reconstruct ion using a standard space-time smoothing often leads to introduction of spurious features. Augmenting space-time smoothing with a simple po int-feature detection/matching scheme, however, can dramatically impro ve the reconstruction product, This paper presents such a motion-compe nsated interpolation algorithm, for reconstruction of open contours ev olving in time given fragmented position data, The reconstruction task is formulated as an optimization problem, and a time-sequential solut ion which adaptively estimates feature motion is provided. The resulti ng algorithm reliably interpolates position measurements of the surfac e temperature fronts associated with the highly convoluted portions of strong ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream and Kuroshio.