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A transferable method for the automated grain sizing of river gravels

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journal contribution
posted on 2006-10-12, 09:44 authored by David GrahamDavid Graham, Stephen Rice, Ian Reid
The spatial and temporal resolution of surface grain-size characterization is constrained by the limitations of traditional measurement techniques. In this paper we present an extremely rapid image-processing-based procedure for the measurement of exposed fluvial gravels and other coarsegrained sediments, defining the steps required to minimize the errors in the derived grain-size distribution. This procedure differs significantly from those used previously. It is based around a robust object-detection algorithm that produces excellent results on images exhibiting a wide range of sedimentary conditions, crucially, without any user intervention or site-specific parameterization. The procedure is tested using a dataset comprising 39 images from three rivers with contrasting grain lithology, shape, roundness and packing configuration and representing a very wide range of textures. It is shown to perform more consistently than the best existing automated method, achieving a precision equivalent to that obtainable by Wolman sampling, but taking between one sixth and one twentieth of the time. The error in area-by-number grain-size distribution percentiles is typically less than 0.05 Ï .

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Pages

1179985 bytes

Citation

GRAHAM, D.J., RICE, S.P. and REID, I., 2005. A transferable method for the automated grain sizing of river gravels. Water Resources Research, 41 (7)

Publisher

© American Geophysical Union

Publication date

2005

Notes

This article was published in the journal, Water resources research [© American Geophysical Union] and is also available at: http://www.agu.org/journals/wr/

ISSN

0043-1397

Language

  • en