Abstract
Abstract. To improve the operation efficiency and reduce the risks associated with exposing surveyors to danger during on-site operations, this paper presents a volume measurement approach of the sand carrier using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery. Instead of the 3D surface interpolation of the sand carrier by total station measuring method or real-time kinematic global positioning system (RTK GPS) measuring method, the finely detailed surfaces of the sand carriers are reconstructed from dense point clouds derived by UAV-based mapping. Then, the volume of sand is calculated by the differential method, which multiplies the height difference between the UAV-derived 3D surfaces of the vessel and sand by the resolution of these surfaces. A total of 10 sand carriers are selected to test and evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, the absolute values of relative deviation between the volume obtained by UAV-based and the reference volume are approximately equal to 2%, which can be considered acceptable and satisfy the need of volume measurement of sand carriers. Compared with the manual field measurement and the laser scanning-based method, the proposed approach performs better in the accuracy of volume measurement or the reliability under the circumstance of a moving carrier. The overall results suggest that UAV-mapping can be used as an effective alternative to the commonly used method for volume measurement of the sand carrier.
Highlights
Sand is an important raw material for many engineering projects and usually transported to the construction site by ship, the efficiency and accuracy of sand volume measurement play a key role in project management (Lu, 2011; Fawzy, 2015)
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used for data acquisition is a consumer-grade UAV, i.e., DJI Phantom 4 PRO shown in Figure 6, with 20-megapixel RGB true color obtained from 1-inch complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) sensor
This paper presents the data acquisition and processing of volume measurement of sand carriers based on UAV mapping
Summary
Sand is an important raw material for many engineering projects and usually transported to the construction site by ship, the efficiency and accuracy of sand volume measurement play a key role in project management (Lu, 2011; Fawzy, 2015). Volume measurement of sand carrier is mainly manual field measurement, which is technically complex and timeconsuming because of the heavy workload, low efficiency, and empirical requirements. This method is difficult to guarantee the accuracy of volume measurement. Based on the measuring instruments used, the traditional methods of volume measurement include total station measuring method and real-time kinematic global positioning system (RTK GPS) measuring method (Hamzah, 2011). The sand carrier is difficult to keep stationary because it may often be disturbed by wind and water flow, in this case, the positions on the sand carrier may change greatly with time, which makes it difficult to be effective for time-consuming methods such as total station-based and RTK GPS-based methods. 3D laser scanning and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-
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