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Title

A VIDEO-BASED, MOBILE WATER LEVEL SENSOR FOR THE SENSOR WEB

Abstract

Flood events with devastating consequences have increasingly occurred during the last decades all over the world. An accurate monitoring of such flooding situations is necessary to enable computation of forecasts and to undertake protective measures. Not everywhere in the world, nationwide networks of water level monitoring stations do exist. And even in countries such as Germany, where persistent water gage networks are installed, an on-demand densification of those networks can help to manage floods more efficiently. Therefore, this work presents an easy to deploy mobile water level sensor system consisting of a network-camera and a simple levelling staff which can be placed into a river. This sensor sytem is directly connected to the Sensor Web and forwards the video stream of the levelling staff to a processing unit which automatically computes the relative water level based on image analysis. The derived water level measurements are also provided via Sensor Web services allowing an interoperable access. Via a website, the administration of the sensor and the monitoring process can be conducted. Due to this simple design, the system can be installed quickly and with low cost. The design of the developed architecture is modular and adjustable and can easily be applied to other scenarios such as traffic monitoring or the automatic observation of crucial facilities.

Authors

Arne Broering - 52North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software
Christian Schmidtchen - 52North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software
Simon Jirka - 52North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software