ITEE Innovation Expo 2008 : Project Details

Measurement of Coastal Wave Heights via Remote Instrumentation

The Coastal Engineering Department at The University of Queensland in conjunction with the Gold Coast City Council and Griffith University have developed a research station buried 3 meters under the sand dunes at the Spit in Southport. This station’s current purpose is to provide research information on coastal waves such as wave height data. The station’s setup includes a series of 12 manometer tubes that are used to measure the heights of waves at set intervals perpendicular to the shoreline, from 50 metres to 500 metre from the shoreline. Currently the heights of the manometer tubes are only able to be tediously measured by hand when someone visits the station. This thesis attempts to provide an automated data acquisition solution to this problem and a means of storing the collected data for research use. The system periodically captures images of the manometer tubes with a standard webcam, applies image processing techniques to each image to determine water levels in each of the 12 tubes in the image, and then transmits this data to a server at the University of Queensland over a 3G connection. Data is then stored at UQ in a mySQL database for later research/educational use. A significant advantage of this system is that real-world wave data can be made readily available for lecture demonstrations and other research needs of the team members.