Toward real-time optical estimation of ocean waves' space-time fields

Stereo 3D reconstruction is continuously increasing its popularity in the study of mid-to small-scale sea waves. In the recent past, different approaches have been proposed to reconstruct the space-time sea surface elevation field from synchronized stereo frames. Usually, the reconstruction is performed by first recovering a dense and sparse 3D point cloud from stereo pairs and then by interpolating it into a regular grid. Even considering state-of-the-art methods, with typical image resolutions, it's unlikely to perform the first step in less than dozens of seconds (without paralellization), that can easily doubled if we include the subsequent interpolation step. This will limit the applicability of stereo based wave analysis for all the approaches (like monitoring or data assimilation) in which the time between the raw acquisition and the output of processed data is critical.