The use of ARGUS video systems offers enhanced opportunities for the monitoring of coastal areas. Covering space scales from less than a metre to several kilometres and time scales from seconds up to years, a wide range of coastal issues can be addressed, such as shoreline evolution, impact of groins and beach nourishments on the coastal system.
As data collection is automatically performed by unmanned video stations, operation is cost-efficient, enabling the technique to be competitive to the traditional survey methods of beach bathymetry and shoreline. Complementary to Deltares modelling tools like the Delft-3D system, the ARGUS video technique has been embedded as a monitoring tool in our consultancy practice.
The ARGUS based monitoring system can be applied in the field of coastal zone management and coastal engineering, in a number of ways:
Every daytime half an hour, snapshot images are collected and averaged over a period of ten minutes, yielding time-exposure images. With the help of sophisticated routines, these oblique images can be projected on the ground plane, resulting in rectified images. These rectified images allow for the quantitative interpretation of image features, using the standard environment to do so, named the Argus Runtime Environment.
Figure: (a) ARGUS video cameras, (b) Oblique ARGUS snapshot image and (c) Oblique ARGUS time exposure image
Figure: (a) ARGUS image in panoramic view and (b) ARGUS image in plan view