Monitoring river channel and flume surfaces with digital photogrammetry

This paper describes and illustrates a technique for high resolution monitoring of the surface morphology of water-worked sediments. The monitoring uses close-range digital photogrammetry. While photogrammetry is a long-established technique, more recent developments in digital photogrammetry allow application in fluvial research to be highly cost effective in both flume and natural river channel studies. Results are presented that involve two scales of laboratory flume: a smaller-scale application associated with sediment sorting processes in a straight channel; and a larger-scale application involving sediment transport and bed material feedbacks in a meandering channel subject to overbank flows. A preliminary assessment of data quality is undertaken with encouraging results. The precision of elevation estimates corresponds to the scale of the imagery acquired and hence may be controlled by design of the image acquisition process.