Typhoon Center Locating Using Rotation Feature Matching Method

Typhoon is a kind of atmosphere swirl which spins round its center and at the same time moves along rapidly. The center collects most of the energy and the water and is the place most destroy happens. Thus its location is very important for typhoon path prediction and disaster forecasting. Typhoon center location task is the continuous research of "eighth five year project" presided by China Meteorological Administration. The tradition prediction method is poor of precision and its error is too great to meet practical requirement. According to the satellite cloud digital image feature and typhoon movement rule, researchers co operate with experts in shanghai central broadcast bureau and advance a new method. In this paper, the rotation matching method is mainly discussed. The method is based on the fact that although the typhoon mass is a non rigid object, the center area can be treated as rigid object and thus the center is one point with zero rotating vector. Thus in typhoon's sequence images, one can find the matching feature points and calculate the rotation center point which has the character of zero rotation vector. This method improves the precision and objectivity. To moving objects like typhoon cyclone, location method combining its moving feature is the certain reasonable way.