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Data Processing Based on Low-Precision IMU
Equipment to Predict Wave Height and Wave Period
Yongle Zhang∗ , Lin Qi∗ , Junyu Dong∗ , Qi Wen† and Mingdong Lv†
∗ College of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China,
Email: zhangyongle@stu.ouc.edu.cn, {qilin, dongjunyu}@ouc.edu.cn
† Qingdao Haiyan Electronics Corporation, Qingdao, China,
Email: info@haiyanec.com
Abstract—This paper presents an effective method for mea-
suring wave height and period using a low-precision IMU
device integrated with a three-axis accelerometer and a three-
axis gyroscope. Firstly, the acceleration of the three-axis sensor
coordinate system is transformed to the acceleration in the
vertical direction under the geographic coordinate system by
Euler angle. Then the noise of the resultant acceleration (vertical
direction) signal is removed by the smoothing process of the
anisotropic diffusion based on the partial differential equation.
Furthermore, the method of frequency domain integration is
adopted to overcome the deviation caused by the quadratic
integral obtaining an accurate wave height and period. Finally,
the experimental comparison results show that the practicality
of the proposed method.
Index Terms—Wave height, Wave period, Fourier transform,
PDE (partial differential equation), Inertial Measurement Unit
I. I NTRODUCTION
Wave is an important part of the detection of ocean condi-
tions. In recent years, wave height and period in designated
sea areas are under urgent need because of increasing marine
and coastal activities. Therefore, the ocean’s wave information
is of significant importance in terms of coastal safety and
navigation routes activities. In order to accurately reflect the
actual situation of the wave, it is important to analyze the data
acquisition and data preprocessing of the wave sensor.
There are three main ways of wave measurement based
on the sensor installation location: wave detector on the
water surface (for example, ground wave radar detector [1]),
wave detector near the water surface (such as gravity wave
detector [2]) and wave detector under the water surface
(such as underwater acoustic wave detector [3]). For wave
detector on the water surface, wave height is measured by
the received radio strength reflecting wave signal. Howeve,
radar simulation technology of image data is complicated in
wave information analysis. For wave detector under the water
surface, it measures the wave height from the change in the
vertical distance from the acoustic transducer placed under
the sea to the sea surface. And it is susceptible that detector
is interfered by small waves and bubbles and has a water
depth limit. For wave detector near the water surface, the
integrated IMU sensor in the buoy body with wave motion
is used to measure the acceleration of the sea water point
along the gravity direction, and the wave height is obtained
after the quadratic integration. The method can measure the

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wave parameter data more realistically, and the detector has no
limitation on the water depth. It is the most used observation
method in the national marine station.
Considering the extensiveness and manageability of the
wave detector near the water surface and the high cost of using
high-precision IMU equipment in batches in engineering, we
use a low-precision IMU device (integrated with a three-axis
accelerometer and a three-axis gyroscope) in our experiment
and process the data collected by it to implement a method
that can effectively measure wave height and wave period.
A three-axis sensor better reflects the trajectory of the buoy
in three-dimensional space. But, low-precision IMU [4] has
the following disadvantage: the mean of sensor signal may
not be zero and the acceleration signal is noisy, which cause
a deviation of quadratic integral. In order to increase the
accuracy of the wave height and period measurement. It is
necessary to take appropriate measures to reduce or remove
noise in the signal.
One way to remove noise from a signal is wavelet trans-
form [5]. Wavelet analysis has the characteristics of multi-
resolution analysis, which brings great convenience to the anal-
ysis of non-stationary signals. However, in practice, wavelet
transform inevitably obscures the details of the signal. There
is also a filter-based denoising method, the denoising effect
depends on the design of the corresponding technical specifi-
cations of the filter, such as the cutoff frequency and quality
coefficient of the filter. An ideal low-pass filter [6] eliminates
all frequencies above the cutoff frequency while passing
frequencies below this value. The low-pass filter causes a
phase shift and distortion of the original signal.
This paper presents a method for effectively measuring the
wave height and period from the acceleration signal. It consists
of two parts. One is to use the PDE (Partial Differential Equa-
tion) method to remove noise in the acceleration signal. PDE
is a novel image processing method [7], which can preserve
small-scale features such as edges and contours of images
while denoising. The denoising of PDE in One-dimensional
time series vibration signals are rarely studied [8], [9]. Due to
the smoothness of the PDE method, it adaptively considers
the low frequency of the sensor output signal, maintains
the continuity and edge characteristics of the low-frequency
signal, and has less damage to the signal characteristics. The
PDE denoising effect is better than the wavelet transform. The

second is based on the frequency domain integration method. coordinate system is transformed to the O−X1 Y1 Z1 coordi-
The resultant acceleration after removing the noise in the nate system. According to the inference method of direction-
first part is processed from the time domain to the frequency cosine-matrix [13], the transformation relationship of the two
domain. The frequency domain integration can avoid the coordinate systems can be obtained as follows:
step to remove the cumbersome trend items when using the ⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
cumulative trapezoidal rule or the Simpson’s rule [10] for x1 cos ϕ sin ϕ 0 x0 x0
multiple integrations in the time domain. It can also avoid ⎣ y1 ⎦ = ⎣− sin ϕ cos ϕ 0⎦ ⎣ y0 ⎦ = RZ ⎣ y0 ⎦ (1)
the amplification effect of the cumulative error of the energy z1 0 0 1 z0 z0
loss caused by the trend items [11].
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II, 2) The θ angle is rotated with the Y1 axis of the new
the acceleration signal acquired by using a low-precision coordinate system as the central axis, and the O−X1 Y1 Z1
device is converted into a vertical acceleration signal in a coordinate system is converted to the O−X2 Y2 Z2 coordinate
geographic coordinate system that can reflect the buoy motion system. The same principle can be used to obtain the coordi-
with the sea surface. Section III is the proposed method for nate transformation relationship:
calculating the wave height and period in the paper. It includes ⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
PDE denoising pre-processing of the resultant acceleration and x2 cos θ 0 − sin θ x1 x1
⎣ y2 ⎦ = ⎣ 0 1 0 ⎦ ⎣ y1 ⎦ = RY ⎣ y1 ⎦ (2)
integration of the pre-processed acceleration in the frequency
domain. The PDE denoising effect was compared to other z2 sin θ 0 cos θ z1 z1
methods. Experimental comparison test and conclusion are
3) The γ angle is rotated with the X2 axis of the new
presented in Section IV and Section V respectively.
coordinate system as the central axis, and the O−X2 Y2 Z2
II. ACCELERATION MEASUREMENT coordinate system is converted to the O−X3 Y3 Z3 coordinate
system. The same principle can be used to obtain the coordi-
The acceleration is a space vector. The three-axis accelerom- nate transformation relationship:
eter measures the acceleration signal of the buoy motion. The ⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
acceleration signal in the three-axis sensor coordinate system x3 1 0 0 x2 x2
needs to be transformed to the geographic coordinates by the ⎣ y3 ⎦ = ⎣0 cos γ sin γ ⎦ ⎣ y2 ⎦ = RX ⎣ y2 ⎦ (3)
attitude angle measured from the three-axis gyroscope [12]. z3 0 − sin γ cos γ z2 z2
After eliminating the effects of gravitational acceleration and
the bias of the sensor, an acceleration component on the Z-axis Combine (1), (2) and (3):
of the geographic coordinate system is obtained. It is shown ⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
in Fig. 1. x3 x0
⎣ y 3 ⎦ = RX R Y R Z ⎣ y 0 ⎦ (4)
z3 z0

−1 −1 −1
Multiply the left and right sides of (4) by RZ RY RX to
get:

⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤⎡ ⎤
x0 cos θ cos ϕ A B x3
⎣ y0 ⎦ = ⎣ cos θ sin ϕ C D ⎦ ⎣ y3 ⎦ (5)
z0 − sin θ sin γ cos θ cos γ cos θ z3

Where
A = sin γ sin θ cos ϕ − cos γ sin ϕ.
B = cos γ sin θ cos ϕ + sin γ sin ϕ.
C = sin γ sin θ sin ϕ + cos γ cos ϕ.
D = cos γ sin θ sin ϕ − sin γ cos ϕ.
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the transformation from geographic coordinate
The sensor has eliminated the influence of the offset be-
system to sensor coordinate system. fore
 use. The output values of the three-axis accelerometer
T
ax ay az and the angle value ϕ, θ, γ of the three-axis
The coordinate transformation from the geographic coor- gyroscope by using equation (5) to obtain the acceleration
dinate system O−X0 Y0 Z0 to the sensor coordinate system Z on the Z-axis of
component (resultant acceleration) named A
O−X3 Y3 Z3 can be expressed as (ϕ, θ, γ, is the Euler rotation the geographic coordinate system (The effect of gravitational
angle): acceleration g has been eliminated):
1) The ϕ angle is rotated with the Z0 axis of the geographic
coordinate system as the central axis, and the O−X0 Y0 Z0 Z = − sin θax + sin γ cos θay + cos γ cos θaz − g
A (6)


 III. P ROPOSED METHOD 20 Hz respectively (Data from Qingdao Haiyan Electronics
In this section, a method for measuring the wave height and Corporation.). It can be seen that the PDE denoising effect
period based on a noise acceleration signal is described. The is better than the wavelet denoising, especially in the region
process is summarized as follows: where the signal is abrupt, and it retains the original useful
1) Eliminate the influence of gravity acceleration and offset signal.
Z .
of sensors, and obtain the resultant acceleration A
2) The acceleration signal is smoothed based on the
anisotropic diffusion method of the partial differential equa-
tion. The denoised acceleration AZ = function(A Z ) is ob-
tained.
3) The acceleration signal AZ in the time domain is trans-
formed into the frequency domain for the quadratic integral to
obtain the displacement s(t), and finally the inverse Fourier
transform of s(t) to obtain the displacement in the time
domain.
A. Signal preprocessing
Due to various external and internal factors of the equipment
system during signal acquisition, the signals collected by the
IMU equipment sandwich many unused components, such as
random noise and trend items. This will have a great impact
on the accuracy of the displacement measurement. In this
paper, the anisotropic diffusion model based on the partial
differential equation used to denoise the acceleration A Z . The Fig. 2. Resultant acceleration signal (50HZ) of denoising after PDE and
Wavelet Process.
basic anisotropic diffusion model [7] is:
⎧
⎨∂sig(x, t)/∂t = div(g(|sig|)sig)
(7)
⎩
sig(x, 0) = sig0 (x)
In the formula: sig0 (x) is the original signal, as the initial
condition. sig(x, t) is the changing signal, |sig| is the signal
gradient amplitude, diffusion coefficient g(|sig|) is a non-
negative monotonically decreasing function with |sig| as an
independent variable. The general diffusion coefficients are:
⎧
⎨ g(|sig|) = exp(−(|sig| /K)2 )
(8)
⎩
g(|sig|) = 1/(1 + (|sig| /K)2 )
In the formula: K is the gradient threshold parameter, and
K is selected by Canny’s histogram estimation method [14].
This paper uses the second diffusion coefficient in the above
formula.
The denoising process of this method consists in: first Fig. 3. Resultant acceleration signal (20HZ) of denoising after PDE and
calculating the gradient amplitude of the signal, and then Wavelet Process.
using the diffusion function to control the smoothing process.
The value of |sig| is larger at the sudden change of signal
amplitude, the diffusion coefficient is smaller, and the diffusion B. Frequency domain integration method
is weaker; the value of |sig| is smaller in the flat region Frequency domain integration can avoid the error accu-
of the signal, and the diffusion coefficient is larger, which mulation amplification effect in the process of secondary
can effectively denoise. When using this model to denoise integration, which has a higher accuracy and stability than
the acceleration signal, it is necessary to discretize equation time domain integration. Fast Fourier Transform is a power-
(8) into a difference scheme for iterative solution. Fig. 2 ful tool for transforming the time domain into a frequency
and Fig. 3 are comparison diagrams of PDE denoising and domain [15]. Since the actual sampled signal is discrete, a
wavelet denoising of the resultant acceleration calculated by discrete Fourier transform algorithm is used in the Fourier
the equation (6) at a sampling frequency of 50 Hz and transform of the signal, and the DFT uses a fast discrete


Fourier transform [16]. For the data point of N sampled in we set the truss rotation time to 10s, and the buoy mounted
time T , the DFT expression of the discrete data x(n) is: on the fixture of the truss rotation diameter to 3m. Record
N −1 the data of the measured buoy sensor (records the acceleration

X(k) = x(n)e−j2πkn/N (9) information and the attitude angle information obtained by the
n=0 IMU and synthesizes it into the vertical acceleration in the
geographic coordinate system). According to the processing
The result of the resultant acceleration A Z after PDE
method proposed in this paper, the corresponding wave height
denoising processing is recorded as AZ . After AZ passes and wave period measurement values of the wave buoy are
the above DFT, the signal becomes a harmonic component obtained. The experimental data (the IMU sampling frequency
in the frequency domain, and the amplitude of the harmonic is 50 Hz) is depicted in Fig. 4. A comparison of the original
component whose frequency is lower than the useful frequency signal and the denoised signal is plotted in the lower graph
is set to zero to remove trend items in the acceleration signal. of Fig. 4 (the blue line represents the original signal of the
It is assumed that the Fourier component of the acceleration resultant acceleration and the red line represents the denoised
signal AZ at any frequency is expressed as: signal of the resultant acceleration). The upper graph of Fig. 4
a(t) = Aejωt (10) is the displacement result of frequency domain integral of the
resultant acceleration after PDE denoising.
In the formula: a(t) is the Fourier component of the acceler-
ation signal in the frequency domain ω; A is the coefficient
corresponding to a(t).
The displacement component is obtained by integrating the
Fourier component of the acceleration signal twice:
t  t 
A
s(t) = Aejωt dt dt = − 2 ejwt (11)
0 0 ω
In the formula: s(t) is the Fourier component of the displace-
ment signal in the frequency domain ω.
After completing the above steps, the inverse Fourier trans-
form [17] is performed to obtain the time domain value.
IV. E XPERIMENT
A. Experimental platform
We calibrated the measurement results of the wave buoys
integrated low-precision IMU sensor proposed in the paper
using a sinusoidal simulation mechanism of rotary truss type
Fig. 4. Frequency domain integral result of the resultant acceleration signal
provided by Qingdao Haiyan Electronics Corporation. Rotary after PDE (10s-3m-50HZ).
sinusoidal simulators reproduce wave eigenvalues well (for
wave heights and wave periods), and many research institutes
(such as the Norwegian Hydraulics Laboratory) have similar
simulation equipment. During the experiment, the wave buoy
is mounted on the fixture of the truss (the fixed position of
the buoy can be adjusted), and the other end of the truss
is fixed with the balance weight, so that the buoy and the
balance weight is kept balanced around the rotation center.
The control truss rotates at a constant speed in a specified
rotation cycle, and the time during which the truss rotates is a
wave period, and the rotation diameter is a wave height. Since
the wave buoy reflects the vertical displacement, we see that
the trajectory of the truss is a circular motion, and the wave
buoy is a sinusoidal motion for given wave height and wave
period.
B. Experimental test
Using the above calibration equipment. Set the rotation
period of the truss, and control the truss to drive the wave
buoy rotation. In this section, we show the results of two sets Fig. 5. Frequency domain integral result of the resultant acceleration signal
of comparative experiments. In the first set of experiments, after PDE (14.2s-3m-50HZ).


 Fig. 5 is the result of the second set of experiments in which
the truss rotation time is set to 14.2s, the buoy mounted on the
fixture of the truss rotation diameter is set to 3m, and the IMU
sampling frequency is 50 Hz. A comparison of the original
signal and the denoised signal is plotted in the lower graph
of Fig. 5 (the blue line represents the original signal of the
resultant acceleration and the red line represents the denoised
signal of the resultant acceleration). The upper graph of Fig. 5
is the displacement result of frequency domain integral of the
resultant acceleration after PDE denoising.
C. Experimental analysis
The results of the displacement curves of Fig. 4 and Fig. 5
were analyzed by the upper zero-point method [18] to obtain
the wave height and period of the measured buoy in the
experiment. The results are shown in Table I and Table II.
TABLE I
T IME ( S ) AND D IS ( M ) ANALYSIS RESULTS OF F IG . 4
Time(s) Dis(m)
1 9.64[(7.36-2.54)*2] 2.829(1.1416+1.6874)
2 9.84[(17.3-12.38)*2] 2.9376(1.4097+1.5279)
3 9.76[(27.2-22.32)*2] 2.9181(1.5496+1.3685)
4 9.8[(37.1-32.2)*2] 2.9639(1.6791+1.2848)
TABLE II
T IME ( S ) AND D IS ( M ) ANALYSIS RESULTS OF F IG . 5
Time(s) Dis(m)
1 13.92[(12.6-5.64)*2] 2.8564(1.3086+1.5478)
2 14.12[(26.84-19.78)*2] 2.9658(1.506+1.4598)
3 14.12[(41.02-33.96)*2] 2.9735(1.4894+1.4841)
4 14.08[(55.22-48.18)*2] 2.9497(1.5558+1.3939)
The analysis results from Table I are very close to the values
of 10s-3m set in the experimental environment. At the same
time, the analysis results from Table II are also close to the
values of 14.2s-3m set in the experimental environment. The
experimental results further verify that the proposed algorithm
can remove the noise of the acceleration signal and achieve
accurate measurement of wave height and period on low-
precision sensors.
V. C ONCLUSION
This paper presents an effective method for measuring wave
height and period based on low-precision IMU equipment.
IMU equipment is integrated into marine buoys for engineer-
ing use. The IMU device integrates a three-axis gyroscope
and a three-axis accelerometer. The PDE denoising method
is used to effectively remove the noise and trend terms of
acceleration signal, and then the frequency conversion method
is used to obtain accurate wave height and period. Finally,
the experimental comparison results are carried out, and the

effectiveness of the algorithm is verified. This method has
wide application value in the data processing of low-precision
wave sensors. For future work, we will use the wave height
and wave period label data to further improve the accuracy of
low-precision IMU equipment using deep learning models.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported in part by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grant 41576011.
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