Slosh Controlling by Image Processing

[Tan9890]

hi.. this is my final year project...
Slosh means, the movement of liquid inside the container, and the inertial effects it produces on the container.
What i'm supposed to do is, there's going to be a transparent plastic container with some liquid (we'l use colored water) and ther's going to be a video camera placed parallel to the water surface outside the container.
Now we're going to rock the container and capture the undulations on the liquid surface, and use this video to create a graph
i made a photoshop image just to clear up the idea.
SO i have a few questions..
1. Now i want the graph to dynamically change its shape as per the liquid surface.. like showing the water level on the screen.. Can matlab do this? or should i go for Open CV..
2. I need some reference on this, like all the math and stuff.. so that i can understand this process of how can i actually achieve this.

 

[misterT]

1. Now i want the graph to dynamically change its shape as per the liquid surface.. like showing the water level on the screen.. Can matlab do this? or should i go for Open CV..
2. I need some reference on this, like all the math and stuff.. so that i can understand this process of how can i actually achieve this.

1) I would go with matlab. I don't know what would be the best way to generate the animated graph, but I know that it is possible to use matlab to create video files of animated graphs. Open CV is also a good choice, but you might end up using more time on learning Open CV and debugging your code than solving the original problem.
2) Don't you have teachers for that? At my school every project work has a supervising teacher that is (more or less) an expert of the subject.

You should be able to extract the waveform from the image using only a few basic image processing techniques. Edge detection is one of them. If you have a colour camera, you could search for edges that appear on the boundary of blue and white areas (if the liquid is blue and the background is white).

 

[Tan9890]

Thanks misterT.. yes i do have 2 guides for me. but they have asked us to do some literature survey.. Although i have found some papers, ieee and thesis.. but they have started from vary advanced stuff.. like all those complicated equations.. i need some basics to understand, so that i can move on to those advanced things..
Also, what according to you, should be the measurements needed to be taken?
Our guide says we have to find some water tilt angles, or how much the water has elevated on one side.. something like that...
Can this be done by simply measuring the y-axes constantly?