Accurate Volume Measurement – The Reason why half of the largest mining companies Use PIX4D mapper – A GEOmatic Development case

The biggest 40 mining companies were announced in PWC’s latest mining report, and nearly half of these companies use drone photogrammetry software (Pix4Dmapper Pro) as part of their mining workflow.

Managing stockpile inventory, that is, finding a solution for accurate volume measurement and easy inventory management, is one of the biggest challenges in the mining industry.

These top mining companies claim that by applying the photogrammetry workflow with Pix4Dmapper Pro, they can achieve measurement accuracies of around 2-5% for their stockpile volumes.

Advantages of using drone photogrammetry instead of traditional ground surveying methods when it comes to stockpile volume measurement?

In real situations, stockpiles do not conform to a perfect shape. Photogrammetric survey with a high ground sampling distance (GSD, which indicates the actual distance each pixel represents) are able to better describe irregular stockpiles in detail.

Horizontally, high-resolution photogrammetric results create more precise stockpile models, and thus better volume measurement accuracy than ones interpolated from certain measured points;

vertically, they lower the uncertainty in Z values, which is proportional to the resolution. For example, flatter stockpiles will benefit more from a high GSD than taller stockpiles.

Read more in our white paper