We do monthly survey flights at 3 different quarries. Looking to compare notes with others doing similar work.
Challenges we're dealing with:
What's your typical quarry survey workflow look like?
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Sign inWe fly quarries weekly. For highwalls, we fly a separate oblique mission at 30° camera angle parallel to the face. This gives much better 3D reconstruction of the vertical surfaces than nadir-only.
For water: we mask it out in processing and interpolate the pit floor from surrounding points. Some software (Pix4D, Virtual Surveyor) has water surface masking tools built in.
Dust is a real problem. We fly early morning before operations start, or right after they water the haul roads. A polarizing filter on the camera helps cut haze but doesn't eliminate it.
Also: never fly during or immediately after blasting. The vibrations can damage your IMU and the dust cloud will wreck your images.