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Stereo System for Remote Monitoring of River Flows

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Abstract

In this article we present a video-based method for river flow monitoring. The proposed method aims at deriving efficient approximations of the river velocity using natural formations on the river surface. In order to overcome peculiarities of the flow, we propose to uniformly exploit all such structures that appear locally with short temporal duration. Towards this direction we explore the expanded capabilities of a stereoscopic camera layout with the dual observation fields and the potential of reverting projective deformations. By mapping to world coordinates, all spatial locations in the video reflect velocity as a uniform field, except for local flow variations. The velocity estimation is performed by computing the optical flow using a series of video frames, combining the information of the views of both cameras. The novelty of the proposed river flow estimation scheme lies on the fact that the accuracy of motion estimation is increased due to the use of the complementary views, which also enables the transition from a 2-Dimensional image-based velocity estimate to 3-Dimensional estimates. The estimated optical velocity is back-projected to the real world coordinates using the parameters extracted using the stereoscopic layout. The results on simulated and real conditions demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient in the estimation of the surface velocity and robust against locally disappearing formations, since it can compensate for a loss with other formations active in the field of view.

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Acknowledgements

This work is elaborated through an on-going THALES project (CYBERSENSORS – High Frequency Monitoring System for Integrated Water Resources Management of Rivers). The project has been co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) – Research Funding Program: Thales. Investing in knowledge society through the European Social fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical and Computer Engineering School, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece

    Konstantinos Bacharidis, Konstantia Moirogiorgou & Michalis Zervakis

  2. Electronics Lab, Physics Department, University of Patras, Patras, Greece

    Georgia Koukiou

  3. Electrical and Computer Engineering School, Manhattan College, Bronx, NY, USA

    George Giakos

Authors
  1. Konstantinos Bacharidis
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  2. Konstantia Moirogiorgou
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  3. Georgia Koukiou
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  4. George Giakos
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  5. Michalis Zervakis
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Correspondence to Konstantinos Bacharidis.

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Bacharidis, K., Moirogiorgou, K., Koukiou, G. et al. Stereo System for Remote Monitoring of River Flows. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 9535–9566 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-5148-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-5148-1

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