A lot of you know I work on a volunteer side project called GaugeCam for the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department at North Carolina State University. The initial program I wrote for the project was made on July 3, 2009 almost exactly five years ago, but the project really started a little before that. We have worked on the project with varying degrees of vigor, but mainly we have kept going fairly consistently for all that time. The most recent couple of events are pretty interesting. I write about all that here, here, and here.
The first came from Norway. A researcher there wanted to put up some cameras in fjords there to measure water height. My colleague, François Birgand sent the gentleman a camera and a calibration target which the researcher dutifully set up in a fjord and the thing did not work. At all. So François got some of the images that had failed and sent them on to me. I could see immediately we had a problem because my software would struggle with two things. The glint at the waterline would confuse our current line find technique and it would be hard to calibrate on a calibration target that filled a very small portion of the field of view relative to previous images. You can see the problem in one of the Norway images shown above. So I started a major update of the program to address those issues. We have now worked our way through most of the current problems and François started a large test run on thousands of images last night to see how much the changes improve our measurements.
Betty Blonde #133 – 01/19/2009
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