Wavenfer is a research initiative exploring how computer vision and machine learning can be applied to nearshore ocean dynamics. Our focus is on developing automated tools that extract meaningful wave metrics from ordinary coastal video footage.

What We Do

Coastal monitoring traditionally relies on expensive instrumentation or labor-intensive manual analysis. We are building open-source software that can watch the waves and measure what matters: how far waves run up the beach, how frequently they arrive, and how they break offshore. These measurements help researchers and coastal managers understand beach behavior, erosion risk, and wave climate.

Our Approach

We combine classical image processing techniques with modern computational methods to detect and track wave features in video. Our pipeline runs on commodity cloud infrastructure, making it accessible and scalable. The system processes raw footage and produces both quantitative data (CSV time series) and annotated video for visual verification.

Why It Matters

Waves shape our coastlines. Understanding their behavior is essential for coastal engineering, hazard assessment, habitat monitoring, and climate adaptation. By lowering the barrier to wave measurement, we hope to support broader and more continuous observation of our changing shores.

This project is under active development. If you are interested in coastal research, wave analysis, or computer vision for environmental monitoring, we would love to hear from you.