Image sequence analysis of complex physical objects: nonlinear small scale water surface waves

Image sequence analysis is a promising tool to study the physics of waves propagating on water surfaces. Physical knowledge about water waves is used to develop two different approaches to sequence analysis: motion is determined (a) in the Fourier space and (b) by a new method based on a direetio-pyramidal decomposition in the space domain. Both methods proof to be interesting tools for investigating the nonlinear nature of water surface waves. Image sequence analysis of such objects opens an exciting interdisciplinary research area between computer vision and the physics of nonlinear phenomena.