Stereo system for remote monitoring of river flowsStereo system for remote monitoring of river flows Peer-Reviewed Journal Publication Δημοσίευση σε Περιοδικό με Κριτές 2018-03-262017enIn this article we present a video-based method for river flow monitoring. The proposed method aims at deriving efficient approximations of the river velocity using natural formations on the river surface. In order to overcome peculiarities of the flow, we propose to uniformly exploit all such structures that appear locally with short temporal duration. Towards this direction we explore the expanded capabilities of a stereoscopic camera layout with the dual observation fields and the potential of reverting projective deformations. By mapping to world coordinates, all spatial locations in the video reflect velocity as a uniform field, except for local flow variations. The velocity estimation is performed by computing the optical flow using a series of video frames, combining the information of the views of both cameras. The novelty of the proposed river flow estimation scheme lies on the fact that the accuracy of motion estimation is increased due to the use of the complementary views, which also enables the transition from a 2-Dimensional image-based velocity estimate to 3-Dimensional estimates. The estimated optical velocity is back-projected to the real world coordinates using the parameters extracted using the stereoscopic layout. The results on simulated and real conditions demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient in the estimation of the surface velocity and robust against locally disappearing formations, since it can compensate for a loss with other formations active in the field of view. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Multimedia Tools and Applications1-32 Bacharidis Konstantinos Μπαχαριδης Κωνσταντινος Moirogiorgou Konstantina Μοιρογιωργου Κωνσταντια Κουκίου Γεωργία Koukiou Georgia Giakos George C. Zervakis Michail Ζερβακης Μιχαηλ Springer Verlag Optical flow Remote sensing River flow monitoring Stereo Vision