A QUANTITATIVE THERMAL IMAGING TECHNIQUE TO EXTRACT A CROSS-STREAM SURFACE VELOCITY PROFILE FROM A FLOWING BODY OF WATER

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is responsible for monitoring river flow rates at over 7,000 locations across the United States. This operation is expensive, inefficient, and often dangerous, as USGS personnel must deploy direct in-the-field measurement equipment to obtain the required flow data during storm events. An affordable, remote, non-contact sensor that is capable of determining river flow rates under a variety of flow environments is, therefore, highly desired by the USGS and other agencies worldwide charged with the task of water flow monitoring and management. A technique is presented in which a cross-stream surface velocity profile is extracted from a series of thermal infrared images of a flowing water surface. Analytical methods and algorithms are borrowed from Quantitative Imaging (QI) fields such as Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PTV), and are adapted for use on the thermographic image set. Monte Carlo Simulations are used to compare several iterative improvements to the initia