MONITORING THE INCEPTION OF SEDIMENT TRANSPORT BY IMAGE-PROCESSING TECHNIQUES

In this paper we present a non intrusive device to detect the inceptio n of sediment transport and to measure bed load in low-submergence flo ws. A solid state linear CCD camera provides linear images of the sedi ment movements across a control section, located on the bottom of a la boratory flume. These arrays of information are reassembled to provide a raster image of the bottom of the flume in correspondence of the co ntrol section. An on-line operating image processing software counts t he number of grains and evaluates their velocity.