A Tropical Cyclone Center Location Method Based on Satellite Image

Accurately detecting and locating the center of the tropical cyclone is critical for the trajectory forecasting. This study proposed an automatic method for centers' location of the tropical cyclones based on the visible or the infrared satellite images. The morphological structure of the tropical cyclone is modeled using the circular pattern. The tropical cyclone center is located based on regional pixels instead of skeleton points. All pixels in a segmented cloud cluster vote for a 2-dimensional accumulator. The center of the cloud cluster is computed by the mean voting distances, which are calculated by fitting quadratic functions in every column of the two-dimensional (2D) accumulator. Then, a linear function is fitted according to the functional relationship between the mean voting distance and voting angle. The fitted coefficients of the linear function are the center coordinates of the tropical cyclone. The proposed method for centers location of the tropical cyclones is tested using visible and infrared satellite images. The results of center location are compared with the best track provided in JMA datasets.