The transverse motion trajectories acquisition of the aeolian saltation sand near the flat bed surface by high-speed digital photography

This paper describes the way to obtained the transverse motion trajectories of aeolian saltation sand by high-speed digital camera. With the assumption that the background images of the static bed surface on two consecutive pictures were uniform, the saltation sand images on each picture were distinguished from the background image of the bed surface by means of a series of image operation processing used on three sequential pictures. Then the transverse motion trajectories of saltation sand were obtained using the superimpose algorithm and the labeling algorithm. The results show that the transverse motion should be taken into consideration when modeling saltation in air.