M Processing

Mesoscale oceanographic features are important aspects of ocean circulation. The high volume of satellite-derived oceanographic data coupled with the high level of human skill associated with the detection of oceanographic features in the data has necessitated automating the interpretation process. Morphological edge detectors produce better results than the conventional template- and differentiation-based edge detectors. A grayscale morphological edge-detection algorithms is developed for automatic delineation of mesoscale structure in digital satellite IR images of the ocean. We compare performances of three morphological edge detectors in sea surface temperature fields. We provide experimental results on images from the North Atlantic under various image settings.