Digital Monitoring of River Pollution Using Satellite Images in Frequency Domain

The method proposed in this paper is associated with the digitizing of river monitoring through the application of Google Maps API and the concepts of Background Subtraction as used in Digital Image Processing (DIP). The proposed scheme obtains roadmap and satellite images of a target latitude and longitude and executes a simplified RGB based image subtraction succeeded by the analysis of water colour in the frequency domain following the application of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) so as to monitor minor variations among the highly correlated pixel values. This novel scheme consists of a four-step process for identification of the differences and variations in obscured the images obtained in real time through Google Maps API and the assimilated images extracted from the database over a profound period of time. The output is computed on the basis of the percentage of change as indicated by the colour variations in the two images after the implementation of the proposed method. 30 different co-ordinate values across the expanse of the river Kaveri were taken as prototypes on which the aforementioned method was applied and the RGB mean was calculated. The method can be scaled to different parts of the country by calibrating their respective databases with historical imagery of maps. In this method, a formula has also been devised for the computation of the Water Quality Index (WQI) of a given region, based on a physical laboratory test conducted there, employing samples of water from the given region.