KOSTASystem Technology

Hardware

A collaboration has been established with the company ISURKI SL as an industrial partner for the development of the hardware. As a result of this collaboration, specific hardware based on ARM technology has been designed to control the cameras and process the images. The stations can control (depending on the resolution) between 3 and 4 GigE cameras, with a single processor and an additional control system that regulates the operating times of each component, optimising the system’s consumption. This has made it possible to reduce the size and consumption of the installations, allowing most of the stations currently installed to be autonomous stations with photovoltaic power supply that integrate all the data capture, processing and transmission elements necessary for the generation of the different types of images used in monitoring. The only infrastructure required is therefore the installation of a pole at the top end of which is placed the support on which all the necessary elements are mounted.

ISURKI is currently responsible for the manufacture, assembly and integration tests of all the stations, being the supplier of the KOSTASystem technology.

Software

The most commonly used products in coastal videometry are those derived from temporal image processing. For this purpose, a development based on the open source software SIRENA (Nieto et al., 2010) is used. SIRENA creates 4 types of images: snap (instantaneous images), timex (average images), var (variance images) and timestack (images accumulated over time based on a defined profile). Typically, the cycle time is set to 10 or 20 minutes and the frequency to 1 or 2 Hz, depending on the application. Subsequently, algorithms and image analysis methods that have been developed by AZTI and other collaborators allow the information to be extracted for the different services.

To geo-reference the information, AZTI has the KOSTA software. This code is based on the methodology proposed by Holland et al., 1997, performing calibration in two stages (intrinsic and extrinsic) and allows the orthorectification of the images in a uniform z-plane or in a predefined mesh of the digital terrain model.

Nexts steps

AZTI, together with different partners, is working on new hardware and software developments to improve the capabilities and efficiency of the KOSTASystem technology (optimised housing, use of infrared cameras, detection of floating debris in the river). In addition, ongoing work on the integration of videometry data with modelling tools is opening up new forecasting capabilities with both long- and short-term applications.

Finally, the prospects for the application of videometry to a wide range of coastal services raise the interest of creating a European coordination. This would allow harmonisation of data within the coastal community. EuroGOOS and EMODnet could play an important role in integrating this technology into a key observation network in the sea-land continuum.