Detecting waves on the water surface

I want to detect the wave pattern on the water surface and express it with a formula.

Since I can shoot videos, both image recognition and video methods are possible, but what should I do? ?

[William Rose]

@大空,

Your question is rather open-ended.

I suspect you will get more assistance, and you will learn more, if you propose your own answer to the question, and provide an idea for a formula. Then you can begin writing some code. Then you can post your work and your initial code (even if it does not run), with a request for more assistance on this site.

One of the things you can think about is whether to A. write code for a still image first, then try to make it work for video images, or B. write code for video only, without ever working on still images.

[Walter Roberson]

If the waves are standing waves and the situation involves light shining through relatively shallow water, then you might be able to to analyze the pattern of light and dark in still images to deduce the wave characteristics.

If that is not the situation you will probably need to analyze video.

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

Have a first look at the power of the 2-D Fourier-transform of your images. That might get you some sense of how wave-patterns in the image are distributed. You might need to undo the perspective-projection of your camera to get as sharp a spectrum as possible.