Abstract

Satellite image sequences visualize important patterns of the atmospheric and oceanographic circulation. Assessing motion from these data thus has a strong potential for improving the performances of the forecast models. Representing a vector field by a vector spline has been proven efficient for fluid motion assessment: the vector spline formulation makes it possible to initially select the locations where the conservation equation has to be taken into account; it efficiently implements the 2nd order div-curl regularity, advocated for trbulent fluids. The scientific contribution of this article is to formulate vector splines in a multiscale scheme, with the double ob jective of assessing motion even in the case of large displacements and capturing the spectrum of spatial scales associ- ated to turbulent flows. The proposed method only requires the inversion of a band matrix, which is performed by an efficient numerical scheme making the method tractable for large satellite image sequences.