Fluvial Photography at LRRD

By Alee

Alee teaches Lily to use the GigaPan

Over the past couple weeks, I've been testing out our new GigaPan Epic Pro system, which is a robot that guides a camera to take nearly perfect panoramic pictures.  The GigaPan software stitches the photos together, and you end up with an extremely detailed shot, which you can then zoom in to see fantastic detail.

We picked it up because we think it will be a powerful tool to use with our Em4 model, especially in conjunction with close range photogrammetry (CRP).

Last week I photographed the Em4 during and after a delta-building run, and you can see the images here.  Zoom in to see fluvial features formed during the run.




Our Ecohydrologist, Lily Hwang, has also started testing the photos taken with the GigaPan with CRP.  We think we can use these pictures to build point clouds, which will be more accurate and efficient than taking all of them the old-fashioned way.  We hope to have some results soon.

I've also been experimenting with ImageJ image processing and analysis software.  ImageJ offers a ton of plugins to aid analysis, and I'm hoping to use one that maps the amount of color in a photo to study our color coded modeling media.

Color coded modeling media in the Em4

Graph showing RGB values in a portion of the
photo to the left, made using the Color Inspector 3D
plugin for ImageJ