Stereo Matching Tecniques for Cloud-top Height Retrieval

This paper presents an ongoing study for the estimation of the cloud-top height by using only geometrical methods. In agreement with some recent studies showing that it is possible to achieve reliable height estimations not only with the classical methods based on radiative transfer, this article includes a comparison of performances of a selected set of vision algorithms devoted to extract dense disparity maps or motion fields from Infra Red stereo image pairs. This collection includes both area-based techniques and an optical flow-based method and the comparison is accomplished by using a set of cloudy scenes selected from the Along-Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR2) database. The first group of algorithms yields results generally comparable in terms of the measures used for the inter-comparison, while the maps from the optical flowbased method are slightly better.