Automated trinocular stereo imaging system for three-dimensional surface wave measurements

A novel automated trinocular stereo imaging system (ATSIS) is developed for non-intrusively measuring the temporal evolution of three-dimensional wave characteristics. The system consists of three progressive digital cameras to provide three independent stereo-pairs, i.e. left–right, left–center, and center–right, for accurately estimating depth of a scene. A third camera assists to resolve correspondence problems due to specular reflection on the water surface and provides additional constraints on image matching, dramatically reducing the chance of a mismatch. An oblique configuration for the trinocular system effectively increases spatial coverage, allowing observations of wave phenomena over a broad range of spatial scales. The height resolution is increased with the optical axes of the cameras pointed at an oblique angle with respect to vertical surface wave displacements. A new exterior calibration procedure is developed in this paper to determine the orientation of cameras in the field. Field experiments demonstrate that ATSIS can robustly measure hundreds of matched image points in seconds, allowing fast extraction of the temporal evolution of a three-dimensional surface wave field.