A study on recovering the cloud top-height from infra-red video sequences

In this paper we present some preliminary results on an opticalfow based technique aimed at recovering the cloud-top height from infra-red image sequences. The recovery of the cloud-top height from satellite infra-red images is an important topic in meteorological studies, and is traditionally based on the analysis of the temperature maps. In this work we explore the feasibility for this problem of a technique based on a robust multi-resolution opticalfow algorithm. The robustness is achieved adopting a Least Median of Squares paradigm. The algorithm has been tested on semi-synthetic data (i.e. real data that have been synthetically warped in order to have a reliable ground truth for the motion eld), and on real short sequences (pairs of frames) coming from the ATSR2 data set. Since we assumed the same geometry as for the ATSR2 data, the cloud top height could be recovered from the motion eld by means of the widely used Prata and Turner equation.