Abstract
The ocean wave information is indispensable to grasp the ocean environment and also important to navigate ships economically and safety. Therefore, many research works about the way of measuring it have been done.
Remote sensing technology using a satellite image is the useful way to measure it. This technology isn't suitable for getting the more detailed information of the limited part, though it is suitable for getting the average information of the large area.
The projected light distribution method was kept proceeding to measure the detailed wave height distribution of the limited part. But, it's very difficult to exceed a laboratory scale
This paper presents the way to measure the unsteady wave height distributions using the wave surface inclination distributions. The wave surface inclination distributions are analyzed images of the reflected light from the surface light source with the color distribution, by applying the Photometric stereo method. An unsteady wave height distribution is measured by this method and compared with the results measured by super-sonic wave height meters. The results show good agreement with them.
