This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Automated measurements provide a promising alternative solution to the task of measuring the orientation of systematic fractures in rock cuts, to provide input to stability modeling programs. Two methods are available; optical image processing and LIDAR (LIght Detection and Ranging) 3-D scans. Both these technologies have been developed to some extent, however individually they are both inadequate for the task at hand.
The cracks or discontinuities in the rock manifest themselves in two ways, as linear traces (lines) on a planar rock cut, and as fracture surfaces (facets) on an irregular rock cut. Some rock cuts manifest discontinuities in one way, some in the other way. In many cases both manifestations can be seen in the same rock cut.
LIDAR measurements have been demonstrated to measure 3D orientations in the second case and optical imaging measurements can at least measure 2D apparent orientations of the trace on the sampling plane. Neither technique tolerates well the situations where the opposite manifestation of discontinues is present. Since many rock outcrops contain both manifestations, current techniques do not work well in most cases.
We will improve on both these methods and to combine them into a single analysis using a LIDAR laser scanning unit that has a built in optical imaging system. Using geometric probabilities we can match the probabilities of a particular set of traces falling on the same orientation plane as a given set of 3D LIDAR generated orientations, discarding traces that do not fit as extraneous noise.
Validation studies will focus on generating steroenet plots of discontinuity orientations provided by the new method and manual fracture orientation measurements. The benchmark will be whether or not a trained engineer will come to the same design conclusions from both the automated and the manual measurements.
The intellectual merit of this work is that this work will add significantly to the advancement of scientific knowledge of rock slope characterization and modeling in discontinuous rock masses. This cross-disciplinary investigation brings together a uniquely qualified team consisting of a geological engineer and a computer scientist to apply advanced mathematical theory and computational science techniques from areas such as computer vision, computer graphics, image processing as well as geometric modeling to a practical geological engineering domain.
The broader impact to society as a whole is that it will result in safer highways because it gives practitioners more and better tools to predict and prevent or mitigate hazards of falling rock on highways. The practitioner will have measurement tools that are more objective, quicker, and safer than manual measurements.
