Currently, it is a hot research topic to retrieve the wave parameters by using X-band marine radar. However, the rainfall noise usually exists in the collected marine radar images, which seriously interferes with the extraction of the wave parameters. To reduce the influence of rainfall noise, the zero-pixel percentage (ZPP) method is widely used to detect rainfall in radar images, but the detection accuracy is limited, and the selection of the threshold needs to be further studied. Based on the ZPP method, the ratio of zero intensity to echo (RZE) method for rainfall detection is proposed in this paper. The detection threshold is determined by statistical analysis of a large amount of radar data. Additionally, it is proposed for the first time to retrieve the rainfall intensity level from X-band marine radar images. In addition, the concept of the occlusion area is proposed. The proposed area and the wave area are used as the rainfall detection area of the radar image, respectively, for experimental research. The data obtained from the Pingtan experimental base in Fujian Province are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the detection accuracy of the proposed method is 11.7% higher than that of the ZPP method, and the accuracy of rainfall intensity level retrieval is 84%.
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.
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