A New Method of Rainfall Detection from the Collected X-Band Marine Radar Images

Abstract

To control the quality of X-band marine radar images for retrieving information and improve the inversion accuracy, the research on rainfall detection from marine radar images is investigated in this paper. Currently, the difference in the correlation characteristic between the rain-contaminated radar image and the rain-free radar image is utilized to detect rainfall. However, only the correlation coefficient at a position in the lagged azimuth is utilized, and a statistical hard threshold is adopted. By deeply investigating the difference between the calculated correlation characteristic and the marine radar images, the correlation coefficient in the lagged azimuth can be used to constitute the correlation coefficient feature vector (CCFV). Then, an unsupervised K-means clustering learning method is used to obtain the clustering centers. Based on the constituted CCFV and the K-means clustering algorithm, a new method of rainfall detection from the collected X-band marine radar images is proposed. The acquired X-band marine radar images are utilized to verify the effectiveness of the proposed rainfall detection method. Compared with the zero-pixel percentage (ZPP) method, the correlation coefficient difference (CCD) method, the support vector machine (SVM) method and the wave texture difference (WTD) method, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method could finish the task of rainfall detection, and the detection accuracy increases by 10.0%, 6.3%, 2.0% and 0.6%, respectively, for the proportion of the 25% training dataset.

Keywords

• correlation coefficient feature vector (CCFV)
• K-means clustering algorithm
• marine radar images
• rainfall detection