Long-term automated monitoring of nearshore wave height from digital video

This paper presents a new method for estimating nearshore wave height from a digital video sequence. The method identifies main wave breaking zones in the video records and estimates the height of breaking waves inside the detected breaking zones. A geometric rectification is applied to the resulting estimation to convert the height measurement from image pixels to meters. The validation of the algorithm was undertaken over three months at Surfers Paradise, Australia. The performance of the algorithm was demonstrated to be comparable with that of buoy-measured wave height, as well as manual estimates of the onshore wave height by a surf reporter. The results indicate that the method can be used as a cost-effective tool for long-term monitoring of nearshore wave conditions.