Apply Image Technology to Flow Discharge Estimation

Abstract

In this paper, an image based approach of the water flow information measurement is proposed. Applying the image based measurement is a safely and efficiently non-contact method. The image based flow discharge estimation method is proposed in this paper. The multi virtual water level probes (MVWLP) method is proposed to estimate water level. This approach mainly applies the color space adjustable technique to reduce noises and uses the adaptive edge detection to extract the water line. Then, the velocity area method (VAM) is applied to estimate flow discharge in this study. The depth-averaged velocity of sampling verticals of the designed transection can be obtained by the image-based surface velocity estimation method denoted large-scale particle image velocimetry (LS-PIV). We convince that the proposed methods are accurate, robust and adaptable enough to overcome multiple conditions.