SnowWatch: Snow Monitoring through Acquisition and Analysis of User-Generated Content
This work addresses environmental monitoring for Alpine regions by providing a complementary tool to traditional methods, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing user-generated content analysis.
The paper tackles the problem of monitoring snow phenomena by developing a system that extracts virtual measurements from user-generated visual content, such as photographs and webcam images of Alpine mountains, and integrates this into a web portal for public engagement and data acquisition.
We present a system for complementing snow phenomena monitoring with virtual measurements extracted from public visual content. The proposed system integrates an automatic acquisition and analysis of photographs and webcam images depicting Alpine mountains. In particular, the technical demonstration consists in a web portal that interfaces the whole system with the population. It acts as an entertaining photo-sharing social web site, acquiring at the same time visual content necessary for environmental monitoring.