Application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle 3D Reconstruction for Quantitative Measurements of the Tailing Pond Dry Beach

Abstract

Dry beach parameters are important indicators for measuring the safe operation of tailings ponds. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is widely used in construction, disaster monitoring, and agriculture. In this paper, a new semi-automatic method is proposed that measures the length and slope of the dry beach in a tailings pond using the point cloud obtained through the 3D reconstruction of UAVs. The programs of dry beach boundary identification, point cloud profile denoising, dry beach length, and slope measurement were established. The proposed method was applied to a case study to monitor the length and slope of a tailings pond dry beach. The results show that the maximum error of the dry beach length measurement is 2.25%, and the error of the slope measurement is 2.67%. The error is within a reasonable range, which can be accepted in practical applications, demonstrating the reliability and accuracy of the proposed method. Compared with traditional methods and image-based dry-beach-monitoring methods, the point cloud model provides comprehensive coverage of the entire dry beach. It enables the measurement of the length and slope of the dry beach at any point while offering an intuitive representation of its surface morphology and topographic features.

Keywords

• tailing pond
• dry beach
• UAV
• three-dimensional reconstruction