Webinar Summary: Stop Drawing Polygons: Automated Stockpile Tracking with SAI
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Summary:
Stockpile numbers affect production plans, sales, and operations bottom-line. But the work to measure and track piles is still too manual on a lot of sites. It’s also inconsistent. If you ask three different engineers to draw the toe of the same pile, you get three different volumes.
That inconsistency kills your end-of-month reconciliation.
We built SAI (Segmentation AI) to fix this. It's an AI-powered tool that automatically finds the toe of your piles and segments them in 3D—no manual polygon drawing required.
In this webinar, we covered:
- New 3D SAI tool We taught our system to recognize what a stockpile looks like. It looks at the geometry of your site—the slopes, the angles, the flat ground—and it draws the boundary line (the toe) for you. It separates the coal from the gravel, and the gravel from the wall.
- The accuracy comparison: We’ll compare the AI’s auto-generated toe lines against manual survey data so you can see and understand the difference.
- Inventory reporting: How to go from flight to a PDF report without drawing a single polygon manually.
- The ROI breakdown: Actual labor hours saved per survey, and what that means for your team's capacity.
Polls:
Q&A:
Do you guys have GCPs available? As an example right now we use Propeller, and they provide us with Aeropoints for our GCPs.
We do not supply GCPs; however we recommend using black and white tiles or using spray-paint marks (X’s or Chevrons) which can be marked as GCPs. These have the benefit of being a much lower cost, can be left at site for more permanent ground control, and if damaged or destroyed is easily replaced.
I know most of stockpiles inventory is done in summer. Do you AI model takes into consideration snow periods?
In non-ideal survey conditions such as snow covered stockpiles assuming the data can be captured and rendered it will treat the surface of the snow as the surface of the stockpile. This would not have a change to the functionality of the AI for calculating volumes and determining the toe of the stockpile. These conditions should be noted in the inventory report by the responsible party as the inventory volumes will likely be higher than if the material was not snow covered.
Can this AI remove any equipment like your stickers or reclaimers within a stockpile?
Yes, there is a setting on uploading named “Auto remove equipment” which has an option to select “Conveyor Removal”. This will normally help remove stackers at site automatically in processing. Also using the DTM surface rather than the DSM surface will help ensure the stackers are removed from the data.
Presenter:
James Kenney, VP of Revenue Operations
With 15+ years in the mining and survey industry, James has worked in as an Engineer across several companies and has accumulated a multitude of knowledge in cutting-edge solutions in photogrammetry, 3D machine vision, AI, and more.
Moderator:
Jose Manuel, Solutions Engineer
With a couple of years in the mining industry, Jose has experience in sales and implementing solutions to improve overall performance. He focuses in driving efficiency in any job he does.
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