3DM Analyst Mine Mapping Suite is a very versatile product. Unlike our custom 3DM solutions, which are designed to automate a single task and perform it repeatedly without user intervention, 3DM Analyst was designed to be used for any remote measurement application out-of-the-box.
Truck Volumes
One of our customers had a one-off requirement to measure the volume of ore carried in the back of their trucks. Since it was not an on-going requirement a custom system was not warranted; instead, the customer solved the problem with 3DM Analyst and a little ingenuity.
The first realisation they had was that in order to form a stereo model of the truck they didn't actually need to have two cameras, or even a single camera that they moved around; they could achieve exactly the same effect by mounting the camera on a pole and driving the truck beneath it, capturing images as it drove past (Figures 1 & 2).
Six points on each truck were surveyed to act as control, establishing a fixed co-ordinate system attached to the truck. All data generated by the software is then generate with respect to that co-ordinate system, irrespective of the truck's location or orientation as it passes by the camera. This allowed the difference in volume to be computed directly for a full and emptry truck.
Once the camera orientations with respect to the moving truck are determined, actually processing a pair of images to create a surface model consisting of over 120,000 points (or approximately one point per 2cm x 2cm square) only takes one minute (Figure 3). See the Samples Page for a sample project.
