Identifying centers of circulating and spiraling vector field patterns and its applications

Identification of centers of circulating and spiraling vector fields, sources and sinks are important in many applications. Tropical cyclone tracking, rotating object identification, analysis of motion video and movement of fluids are but some examples. In this paper, we introduce a method for finding the centers of circulating and spiraling vector field patterns. It can handle vector fields with multiple centers and is robust against noise. We provide a theoretical analysis on the validity of our method, and application examples in the fields of multimedia processing and meteorological computing to demonstrate its practical use.