ISPRS-Annals ISPRS Annals of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Annals ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9050 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-annals-V-3-2020-19-2020 VOLUME MEASUREMENT OF SAND CARRIER USING UAV-BASED MAPPING He H. 1 Xu X. 1 Chen T. 2 Lu P. 3 School of Geomatics, East China University of Technology, Nanchang 330013, China School of Water Resources & Environmental Engineering, East China University of Technology, Nanchang 330013, China School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China 03 08 2020 V-3-2020 19 24 Copyright: © 2020 H. He et al. 2020 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/isprs-annals-V-3-2020-19-2020.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/isprs-annals-V-3-2020-19-2020.pdf

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.