Monitoring the inception of sediment transport by image processing techniques

Abstract

 In this paper we present a non intrusive device to detect the inception of sediment transport and to measure bed load in low-submergence flows. A solid state linear CCD camera provides linear images of the sediment movements across a control section, located on the bottom of a laboratory flume. These arrays of information are reassembled to provide a raster image of the bottom of the flume in correspondence of the control section. An on-line operating image processing software counts the number of grains and evaluates their velocity.