Digital bed sediment camera, "eyeball"

Student Andrew Schwartz positions a camera to measure beach-sand grain size. The grain size parameters can be extracted from a digital image by an analysis of the variation and offset of the pixel intensities. This allowed us to process over 300 sediment samples in less than a day, whereas traditional sieving could take several months of work. A standard digital camera is housed in a custom waterproof casing for use in the coastal environment.