Usage of single-camera video recording to measure sea surface roughness with machine learning methods

Abstract

Photometry is a convenient operational method for monitoring such dynamically evolving phenomena as wind waves. Nowadays machine learning allows one to avoid explicit derivation of the solution to the problem, describing all the instructions for transforming the input data into the final result. Instead, an algorithm is used to independently find solutions through the integrated use of statistical data, from which patterns are derived, on the basis of which forecasts are made. An example of a problem for which a regular solution has traditionally been applied is the prediction of wave height from the input brightness of a water surface. The task is complicated by the multitude of possible physical models and the need to apply calibration coefficients. In this paper, we solve the problem of how, basing on the obtained brightness values and the corresponding heights, to train the neural network to further predict the heights from the incoming brightness values with the greatest accuracy.