Category: GaugeCam Page 1 of 2

I got to watch a PhD dissertation defense for a University of Kansas student who used our GRIME2 software for one of her dissertation chapters. She did a GREAT job. Troy, Mary, and I all worked with her on her project to measure stage in non-perennial streams.

Not much to say other than everything I have going so far works great. Next step is to be able to create a calibration from scratch.

Troy has been sending me links to new papers on the measurement of water level with cameras that kind of make me crazy. We have been doing this for over fifteen years now and papers are coming out that do not cite us that describe things we did with thousands and thousands of images. Beside the fact that virtually every paper we have ever seen used data sets of 10’s to 100’s of images with maybe one or two that had up to a couple thousand. But they were presenting nothing new on with super small datasets on stuff we had already done on tens of thousands of images. One of those papers even used stop signs to perform a pixel to world coordinate conversion. Oh well.

Machine vision, 24/7/365 in the wild under all weather and lighting conditions has challenges most laboratory and factory settings never encounter. For the GaugeCam GRIME3 software, fog, snow, glint from water reflections, debris, nighttime IR lighting vs. daytime ambient lighting, ices, and animals wandering into the scene are everyday occurrences. We have worked on our line finding algorithm for a long, long time and are amazed it how well it does. The waterline find in this image is a good case in point. The one greatest challenge for our software is biofouling when crud builds up at one or more water levels when the water level does not change for a day or even a few hours. We are working on solving that problem with AI right now, but hope to eventually get completely away from the kinds of surfaces that accumulate biofouling marks to no artificial surface at all.

The camera-based water level measurement software upgrade from GaugeCam GRIME2 to GRIME3 hit a major milestone today today with GRIME3 Pre-release version 1.5. It is a research version, not yet ready for publication but to do the research to determine whether our new algorithms improve the precision of the water level detection in the presence of biofouling and other image degradation using a variety of both deterministic and stochastic (AI) techniques to improve the water level. I am downloading two data sets of 800 and 8000 images now and will receive a hard drive with ~30k images in the mail in a week or sot that I will run through the GRIME3 software, God willing, so we can start evaluating the numbers to see how we did.

The first prerelease version of GRIME3, the Python port of GRIME2, is up and available for download on GitHub. It has almost all the functionality of the CLI version of GRIME2, but with improved waterline and octagon finding. There has already been one small feature release. I expect there will be one or two more of those before I move on to start integrating the second major prerelease version that features a GRIME AI segmentation model to help us deal with the pernicious biofouling that plagues camera based water level measurement. Testing of the first prerelease version is planned for next week in Troy Gilmore’s lab at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

I am extremely grateful for the Panera by our house. When Lorena goes shopping at Costco, Trader Joe’s, Wegman’s, Home Goods or the plethora of other stores around here, she drops me off at Panera. I drink coffee and work on GRIME3. The have a good internet connection, I love the coffee, and my favorite table is almost always available. I think it helps we are there mostly during slow hours, because I do not think it would be so good during the rush. I think about 80% of the work I have done so far on the project has been here at Panera and that percentage is rising.