In shallow flow conditions, turbulence effects appear on a water surface as a form of irregularity of surface shape composed of a large number of fluctuating ripples. The intensity of such a fluctuation increases with the Froude number and also with the Reynolds number as can be observed in flooding river flow. In such a flow condition, surface irregularities are viewed as surface features or textures moving with the flow. Although there has been a discussion in terms of the traceability of surface features, the advection speed of surface features agrees well with the surface velocity from a practical point of view. Based on the assumption about the traceability of surface features, image-based techniques have been developed in the past decades. The space-time image velocimetry (STIV) is one of those techniques developed by Fujita et al. (Int J River Basin Man 5(2):105-114, 2007), with success of measuring river surface velocity distributions without seeding the flow. However, there is still some room for improvement in determining accurate surface velocity from a space-time image (STI) used in STIV. For that purpose, a novel technique was developed that utilizes the two dimensional auto-correlation function of the image intensity in an STI together with quality indices of STI. The performance of the new technique was verified using synthetic images as well as its application to the measurement of snowmelt flood.

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