The invention discloses a river surface photographic surveying method based on height-change 
homography. According to the method, a camera is erected on one side of a river 
bank to 
shoot a river surface at a gradient 
visual angle; firstly, 8 non-coplanar square opposite angle markers are uniformly and symmetrically distributed on the two sides of the river to serve as ground control points, the crossing points of marker posts and the water surface and the crossing point of a water gauge and the water surface are used as water control points, and a non-
prism total station is adopted for measuring the world coordinates of the water control points; then the sub 
pixel image coordinates of the ground control points are attracted through a man-
machine interaction way, and a DLT (
direct linear transformation) factor and an optimized aberration coefficient are solved through 
direct linear transformation for aberration correction; next, water gauge image reading and 
water level value attracting are performed automatically through an 
image identification method, and the gradient coefficient and the 
water level coefficient are calculated by using the world coordinates of the water control points, so as to build a water surface elevation model; finally, water surface image point coordinates are converted to be object space coordinates by using a height-change 
homography relation, so as to accomplish fiver photographic surveying. According to the invention, the 
system distribution is simple, the cost is low, and the method is applicable to high-accuracy river surface photographic speed surveying.