Image or Video processing for Terrain Analysis?

[ash]

I think this falls in the purview of Computing. I have a sensor that will be in motion (so will it vibrate somewhat), and will either be a camera taking still photos OR streaming a video to a computer.The question is, which is better suited to do some basic terrain analysis? I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for in the analysis yet.. perhaps to see landscape erosion or just mapping.

What advantages would video data have over image data in terms of that type of analysis?

I'll most probably end up using MATLAB for the analysis.

This is for a project I'm working on, but is also highly applicable for CE Bot too

Thanks in advanced!

[ash]

Some updates:

I might stick to video after all. Last week I was fooling around with the Robo Realm software, and I tried out the Sobel Filter on the webcam output. Quite an interesting edge detection filter.. might be useful for the terrain analysis

Sobel operator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Probably need to work out the optimum angle of the gradient sweep.

Another thing to consider with video streaming is the noise.. perhaps just using a median filter is enough?