ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Remote Sens.
Sec. Data Fusion and Assimilation
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsen.2025.1693042
Estimating Wave Height Based on Feature Fusion of Ship Motion Response and X-Band Radar Images
Provisionally accepted
- 1Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China
- 2Luoyang Normal University, Luoyang, China
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Since estimating the encountered sea wave is particularly important, retrieving significant wave height (SWH) from ship motion response (SMR) and X-band marine radar images is investigated. Although the SMR and radar images have been widely utilized separately for estimating SWH, the retrieving accuracy and reliability under complex nonlinear sea conditions should be further enhanced. In this paper, the features of the SMR and the radar image are investigated. The feature fusion method based on the statistical characteristic extracted from SMR history data and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) feature achieved from radar images is proposed for estimating SWH. The feature vector and observation matrix are constructed by using the significant value extracted from the SMR history data and the wave SNR extracted from radar images. Then, the weight coefficient of the feature vector, which is used to estimate SWH, is determined based on the least square fitting algorithm. Using the simulated SMR history data and radar images, the experiment result demonstrated that the proposed feature fusion approach has better retrieving accuracy than the SNR-based approach, the colorization coefficient (CC) of retrieved SWH approximately approaches 1, and the root mean square error (RMSE) decreases to 0.14 m.
Keywords: Feature fusion, Marine radar images, Ship motion, wave height, signal-to-noise ratio
Received: 26 Aug 2025; Accepted: 22 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Wei and Lu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zhizhong Lu, luzhizhong@hrbeu.edu.cn
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