Extracting, Visualizing and Tracking Mesoscale Ocean Eddies in Two-dimensional Image Sequences Using Contours and Moments

Abstract

We introduce a system to extract and track mesoscale eddies captured in massive global ocean simulations. The major strength and contribution of our system is its design, which is based on two-dimensional image data processing. The Cinema database [CD] enables the generation and storage of two-dimensional image data taken in-situ, i.e., the creation of images via a virtual camera generating images during the ongoing simulation. The problem of eddy extraction and tracking is simplified by our approach to the problem of finding, matching and tracking eddies in two-dimensional images, thus eliminating the task of processing the original three-dimensional data set. Our system can be used on a simple desktop computer and provides an intuitive interface allowing a scientist to perform an eddy analysis for global ocean data in real-time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our implementation for a specific simulated data set.