International audienceThe paper describes an operational method of rainfall now-casting based on ground radar acquisitions with high space and time resolution. The nowcast horizon is between 30 minutes and 1 hour as required by prevention measures of flash floods. The characteristics of the input data justify the design of an image-based method that estimates wind fields from image acquisitions and forecasts the location and quantity of rain in the near future. The estimation phase relies on an iterative data assimilation of the radar acquisitions with an evolution model of motion and image fields, while the forecast is obtained by simulating these fields at the chosen horizon. The research is done in the context of a collaboration with the french company Numtech and the data are obtained with radars of the company Weather Measures
This paper has two coupled objectives: estimating motion and tracking a given object on an image sequence. It relies on a data assimilation approach, that solves evolution equations of motion, those of image brightness, and those of the distance map modeling the object's boundary. The two last express the optical flow constraint, which assumes that image brightness and distance map are advected by velocity. The method assimilates contour points by an innovative approach combining two criteria. First, the boundary of the object should match contour points at acquisition dates; second, the control of the distance between each pixel and the object's boundary allows to better motion estimation on the whole domain. The method is tested on synthetic data and satellite acquisitions.
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