The Toolbox for River Velocimetry using Images from Aircraft (TRiVIA)

River Research and Applications
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Abstract

Accurate knowledge of the speed at which water moves along a river is essential for understanding ecohydraulic processes and managing natural resources. Measuring flow velocity via remote sensing can be more efficient than conventional field methods, and powerful computational techniques for inferring velocity fields from videos or image time series have been developed. The development of dedicated software tools for particle image velocimetry (PIV) could facilitate greater use of these methods by the river community. This paper introduces a standalone app designed for this exact purpose: the Toolbox for River Velocimetry using Images from Aircraft, or TRiVIA. The program provides a complete workflow for producing spatially distributed velocity vectors from a video or sequence of images, all within an accessible graphical user interface. TRiVIA includes modules for extracting and resampling frames, stabilization and geo-referencing images, defining a region of interest, enhancing images, performing PIV with an efficient ensemble correlation algorithm, visualizing results, assessing accuracy assessment, and exporting PIV output. We illustrate the software's capabilities using an example data set from a large river in Alaska. The initial release of the toolbox is now freely available. Augmenting TRiVIA to incorporate bathymetric information could enable discharge calculation functionality.

Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title The Toolbox for River Velocimetry using Images from Aircraft (TRiVIA)
Series title River Research and Applications
DOI 10.1002/rra.4147
Volume 39
Issue 8
Year Published 2023
Language English
Publisher Wiley
Contributing office(s) WMA - Observing Systems Division
Description 12 p.
First page 1457
Last page 1468
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