CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

A suitable knowledge of coastal systems, of its morphodynamic characteristics and its response to storm events and man-made structures is essential for littoral conservation and management. Nowadays webcams represent a useful device to obtain information from beaches. Videomonitoring techniques is generally site specific and softwares working with any image acquisition system are rare. Therefore, this work aims at submitting theory and applications of a new video monitoring software: Beachkeeper plus, a free user-friendly software, based on Matlab®. Through a simple guided interface the user can analyze images and photos coming from any kind of acquisition system (webcams, digital cameras, or images downloaded from internet) performing georeferenciation, rectification, averaging and variation. This software was operated either in Pietra Ligure (Italy), using images from a tourist webcam, and in Mar del Plata (Argentina) using images from a digital camera. Thanks to this experimental use, Beachkeeper plus applicability was demonstrated. In fact, in both cases the reliability in different geomorphologic and morphodynamic conditions was confirmed by the good quality of obtained images after georeferenciation, rectification and averaging.