Integration of UAV-Based Photogrammetry and Terrestrial Laser Scanning for the Three-Dimensional Mapping and Monitoring of Open-Pit Mine Areas

Abstract

This paper presents a practical framework for the integration of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based photogrammetry and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) with application to open-pit mine areas, which includes UAV image and TLS point cloud acquisition, image and cloud point processing and integration, object-oriented classification and three-dimensional (3D) mapping and monitoring of open-pit mine areas. The proposed framework was tested in three open-pit mine areas in southwestern China. (1) With respect to extracting the conjugate points of the stereo pair of UAV images and those points between TLS point clouds and UAV images, some feature points were first extracted by the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) operator and the outliers were identified and therefore eliminated by the RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) approach; (2) With respect to improving the accuracy of geo-positioning based on UAV imagery, the ground control points (GCPs) surveyed from global positioning systems (GPS) and the feature points extracted from TLS were integrated in the bundle adjustment, and three scenarios were designed and compared; (3) With respect to monitoring and mapping the mine areas for land reclamation, an object-based image analysis approach was used for the classification of the accuracy improved UAV ortho-image. The experimental results show that by introduction of TLS derived point clouds OPEN ACCESSRemote Sens. 2015, 7 6636 as GCPs, the accuracy of geo-positioning based on UAV imagery can be improved. At the same time, the accuracy of geo-positioning based on GCPs form the TLS derived point clouds is close to that based on GCPs from the GPS survey. The results also show that the TLS derived point clouds can be used as GCPs in areas such as in mountainous or high-risk environments where it is difficult to conduct a GPS survey. The proposed framework achieved a decimeter-level accuracy for the generated digital surface model (DSM) and digital orthophoto map (DOM), and an overall accuracy of 90.67% for classification of the land covers in the open-pit mine.

A Linear Feature-Based Approach for the Registration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Remotely-Sensed Images and Airborne LiDAR Data

“…The UAVRS images used in the study were acquired in November 2011 and the UAV system used for image acquisition was ISAR-II, a fixed wing UAV equipped with a POS system including GPS and IMU for navigation and providing initial EO parameters for the acquired images, the detailed information could refer to [51]. The accuracy of the attitude data from the IMU is rated as˘2˝for roll and pitch and˘5˝for heading.…”

Use of a remotely piloted aircraft system for hazard assessment in a rocky mining area (Lucca, Italy)

“…Indeed, RPAS photogrammetry for engineering geological investigations has become widespread mainly because it is a costefficient, highly flexible and safe technique (Remondino et al, 2011;Siebert and Teizer, 2014;Tannant, 2015). There are several photogrammetric studies using RPAS for the geomorphic feature characterization or mapping of the surface extent in open-pit mines (Lamb, 2000;Chen et al, 2015;Shahbazi et al, 2015;Tong et al, 2015;Esposito et al, 2017), and few studies are also associated with the use of RPAS for discontinuity characterization of rock slopes affected by mining activity. Salvini et al (2017), for example, used RPAS to map discontinuities in a marble quarry and to subsequently build 3-D discrete fracture network models.…”

UAV Remote Sensing Surveillance of a Mine Tailings Impoundment in Sub-Arctic Conditions

“…UAV-SfM has recently been applied in mapping surface displacement in various fields, such as glaciology and landslide monitoring [17][18][19][20][21][22]. However, most mining-related research utilizing UAVs has focused on mapping open pit and stockpile geometry [23][24][25][26][27], and, to our knowledge, there is no published, peer-reviewed research addressing the utilization of UAVs in the context of mine tailings.…”