• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.47 no.6
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• pp.537-546
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• 2014

Surface image velocimetry was introduced as an efficient and sage alternative to conventional river flow measurement methods during floods. The conventional surface image velocimetry uses a pair of images to estimate velocity fields using cross-correlation analysis. This method is appropriate to analyzing images taken with a short time interval. It, however, has some drawbacks; it takes a while to analyze images for the verage velocity of long time intervals and is prone to include errors or uncertainties due to flow characteristics and/or image taking conditions. Methods using spatio-temporal images, called STIV, were developed to overcome the drawbacks of conventional surface image velocimetry. The grayscale-gradient tensor method, one of various STIVs, has shown to be effectively reducing the analysis time and is fairly insusceptible to any measurement noise. It, unfortunately, can only be applied to the main flow direction. This means that it can not measure any two-dimensional flow field, e.g. flow in the vicinity of river structures and flow around river bends. The present study aimed to develop a new method of analyzing spatio-temporal images in two-dimension using cross-correlation analysis. Unlike the conventional STIV, the developed method can be used to measure two-dimensional flow substantially. The method also has very high spatial resolution and reduces the analysis time. A verification test using artificial images with lid-driven cavity flow showed that the maximum error of the method is less than 10 % and the average error is less than 5 %. This means that the developed scheme seems to be fairly accurate, even for two-dimensional flow.