Abstract
The advantage of aerial vehicles in observing various geographic features is its wide field of view, which is different from an observation from the ground. Although the field of view depends on the height of the vehicle and the lens aperture, an area with a side length of more than one hundred meter can be observed at one time. As for measurements of a river reach, a manned helicopter or an unmanned air vehicle has been used to shoot river surface flows, from which surface velocity distributions can be measured by an aerial LSPIV or an aerial STIV techniques developed by our research group. In this paper, a new image stabilizing method was developed for video images shot from navigating aerial vehicles such as a manned helicopter or a UAV. Moreover, the relative accuracy between LSPIV and STIV was discussed for the same aerial videos. The developed method was applied to several new and old videos shot from manned helicopter or an UAV.
