Development of an application for river discharge measurement

Details

Supervisors

Soares Frazao, Sandra

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil mécanicien

Abstract

River flow measurements are not recent and are required in many different fields. Moreover, since the river flow fluctuates over time it must be measured regularly. Those fluctuations have been amplified with the climate change during the last years. However, the most widespread techniques are often intrusive, expensive and their deployment can be complicated especially in extreme conditions like floods. Therefore, the interest in imaging techniques which address these issues has been growing in the last years. Each technique is focused on one aspect of the discharge analysis. Thus, they are often implemented in different software which makes the analysis more tedious to perform. The aim of this work is to develop a stand-alone application implementing imaging techniques which computes the discharge of a river. The application performs the analysis based on a video sequence of the river which needs to be seeded (e.g. with wood shavings) and the knowledge of its cross-section. During the development of the application the techniques studied in the previous Master Theses will be presented and modified. New methods for the water level measurement will also be developed. Finally, several image processing techniques will be implemented allowing to fix potential distortions in the images or to enhance their quality before the analysis. At the end of this document the results obtained by the application developed in the frame of this work and out-of-the-shelf image-based discharge computation software will be compared. The results are encouraging since both provide similar results on a real river example. It is still necessary to benchmark the application using a larger set of examples and comparing the different implemented water level estimation methods. Some areas for improvement are also presented in the end regarding the velocity analysis and the features that could be interesting to implement.