Mitigation of Rain Effect on Wave Height Measurement Using X-Band Radar Sensor

The presence of rain can negatively affect the performance of many sensors such as X-band radar. In this paper, an effective approach is proposed to mitigate the effect of rain on significant wave height (
${H}_{s}$
) estimation from X-band radar sensor data along with a machine-learning (ML)-based method. First of all, the haze removal algorithm is applied to rain-contaminated radar images as pre-processing. Then, three different features are extracted from the processed radar images. Different combinations of these three features are utilized to estimate
${H}_{s}$
under the rain condition by using support vector regression (SVR)-based and temporal convolutional network (TCN)-based regression methods. It is found that the root-mean-square-errors (RMSEs) of
${H}_{s}$
estimation results using two typical methods (signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-based and ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD)-based linear fitting methods) are decreased by 0.14 m and 0.48 m after introducing the haze removal algorithm, respectively. Also, a relatively high accuracy can be achieved using the SVR-based regression method with the combination of SNR and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) features. Compared to the SNR-based and EEMD-based linear regression methods, the proposed SVR-based method further improves the estimation accuracy, with reductions of RMSE by 0.19 m and 0.82 m, respectively.