In regional news, we have three new connections in Ogof Agen Allwedd, a report on the iron mines of Anjou, an extension to Big Sink Cave in the Forest of Dean, a new dig in Yorkshire's Marble Steps Pot, student parties, an obituary for Tony Boycott, a tight find in the Peak District and a discovery in County Kerry with extensive formations.
Is there currently a sensible workflow for deriving a 2D paper survey from a 3D model? The thing about surveying currently, even with a Disto, is that the process is designed around getting a good 2D representation right from the start. I don't know how this would work for a 3D modelling workflow.How far away are we from having a caving lamp with’survey mode’ that plots a 3D model as you go.!?
We just need a skilled professional software developer, with experience in AI, to spend the next 10 years developing a 3D-2D interpreter. Train a neural network on 3D scans of caves with excellent 2D surveys - a few thousand should do (so maybe add a few teams of experienced surveyors to become full-time surveyors). If that all goes well, I reckon you'll save at least half the time of going from 3D lidar to 2D survey, once someone's gone over the resulting output and corrected all the mistakes.Is there currently a sensible workflow for deriving a 2D paper survey from a 3D model? The thing about surveying currently, even with a Disto, is that the process is designed around getting a good 2D representation right from the start. I don't know how this would work for a 3D modelling workflow.
That actually wouldn't be that hard to programme, the hard part is the getting the amount of processing power AI uses into something that can be carried by hand, people use AI on their phones but all the AI's processing is done on external servers, you can run models on your pc but you'd need an AM5 processor for it to be any good.We just need a skilled professional software developer, with experience in AI, to spend the next 10 years developing a 3D-2D interpreter. Train a neural network on 3D scans of caves with excellent 2D surveys - a few thousand should do (so maybe add a few teams of experienced surveyors to become full-time surveyors). If that all goes well, I reckon you'll save at least half the time of going from 3D lidar to 2D survey, once someone's gone over the resulting output and corrected all the mistakes.
I don't know about that - sure training the model would be expensive, but once you've got the weights running them is far less computationally costly. We'd also expect to be doing this on a desktop outside the cave environment anyway, as processing LIDAR point clouds is horrendously computationally intensive.the hard part is the getting the amount of processing power AI uses into something that can be carried by hand
Luckily Leica Geo systems has software that does exactly that, but as far as I know it's only usable with their surveying systems, which are excessively expensive.I don't know about that - sure training the model would be expensive, but once you've got the weights running them is far less computationally costly. We'd also expect to be doing this on a desktop outside the cave environment anyway, as processing LIDAR point clouds is horrendously computationally intensive.
The impractical bit is getting enough training data - you'd need loads of 3D scans and surveys of the same bits of passage. The problem framing would also be a complete nightmare, as you'd have to condense a point cloud into a lower dimensional space that is feasible for the model to fit, which would be a challenging problem.
Ultimately this isn't a good problem for a data driven model, as it should be fairly straightforward to determine a reasonable algorithm for deriving a plan and EE from a 3D model (with centerline would help a lot). A cartographer could then adjust, add symbols etc., in the usual way.