Wave equivalent plane estimation for wave reconstruction in imaging through water waves

Viewing an airborne scene from a totally submerged camera will suffer severe refractive distortions due to the water surface random fluctuation. One way to reduce this distortion is to use a wave sensor to image a known guide star, through which the water wave surface is measured and reconstructed. In the wave reconstruction, a wave equivalent plane is needed to determine the positions of the wave normal vector samples. The equivalent plane is determined by measuring the under water depth of the wave sensor using a pressure-based gauge. This way can't reveal the overall wave distribution and the reading is usually haphazard. In this paper, a novel wave equivalent plane estimation method based on the incident rays parallelism is presented. Computer simulation results show that the derived plane with the minimum reconstructed sampling position error (PMPE) is the ideal equivalent plane, and the estimated plane based on the incident rays parallelism is in agreement with PMPE. Experiment results are also presented.