Open Cut » Geology
Central to all geological characterization, including the interpretation of vast amounts of geophysical data are geological observations made on drill core and chips. Two factors that impede the quality and reliability of these observations are inconsistencies of visual observations between observers, and a lack of tools to efficiently reconcile the observations against photographic records.
The objective of the project was to deliver a software toolkit that:
- Produces depth-calibrated 2 or 3-dimensional photographic images of drill core to allow direct visual comparison with geological/geotechnical observations and geophysical data; and
- Allows efficient and consistent geological/geotechnical observations by utilizing reference image collections to produce a rock description that integrates with mine site data coding conventions.
The deliverable of the project is a beta version software tool (CoreProfiler) that can build a scaled continuous image of drill core from hand-held core tray or core split photographs, and allows logging of geological and geotechnical information directly from the scaled image. The logging tool makes use of a digital image reference library (Images from Mallett and Leach, 1989). Logging sheets, data dictionaries, reference images and links into the reference library are user-defined and can be set up to follow standard mine conventions. Images and data can be exported to the software packages most commonly used by mine sites.
CoreProfiler version 1.0.2740.19880 is freely available to the Australian Coal Industry.