Digital Imaging Activities for Civil Engineering Students

Digital imaging is an exciting field with applications in all areas of engineering.It currently represents one of the major research and development focus areas with sales exceeding 10 billion dollars per year.The technology has also become a part of our daily lives through televisions, cameras, scanners and medical X-rays.Engineers play an important and expanding role in this exciting field, yet undergraduate engineering students in civil and environmental engineering are rarely exposed to digital imaging through their coursework.The College of Engineering at Rowan University received funding from NSF to integrate digital imaging technology (DIT) in our undergraduate engineering curriculum.Faculty from all engineering disciplines with expertise in DIT participated in this exciting project to develop hands-on experiments for undergraduate engineering students.Experiments developed were such that all engineering disciplines would benefit from the endeavor.Certain digital imaging experiments have generated a lot of excitement in the Civil and Environmental Engineering program as many of the laboratory experiments are extremely traditional and are required to follow standard methodology.It is anticipated that other institutions will adopt the experiments that were developed as all educational materials are provided through a dynamic website.