Abstract: Facing the demand of loading volume estimation for vehicles in open pit mines, this paper proposes an automatic measuring method using single-pulse laser scanning. First, we use a fixed single pulse laser to scan the target vehicle in a bird view, and then segment the point cloud of the load surface using the vehicle morphological features. Following that, we reconstruct the load surface model by temporal correction and matching the pre-constructed vehicle database, and finally estimate the loading volume by slicing and integrating the surface model. We apply the proposed method to Qidashan iron ore open pit mine for load volume estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed method enables to obtain the surface 3D point cloud of the load in real time under the moving conditions of vehicles. Besides, the average error of 3D modeling is 2.54 cm, whereas the error of load volume estimation is 1.17%.

Key words: mining engineering, load estimation, laser scanning, point cloud processing, tense correction