An autonomous, omnidirectional, digital, borehole imaging system

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:This thesis documents the research, design, implementation and successful testing of aprototype camera probe to survey the inside of hard rock boreholes. Rock coreimages are intended to aid mine geologists in recording the borehole rock layers. Thesystem consists of a wide-angle fisheye lens mounted onto a CMOS digital imagesensor. The image data is read in and processed by an FPGA, then stored on aremovable sn flash memory card. All of the aforementioned components aremounted inside a watertight Perspex tube. Application specific PC software is used toprocess the data to form strip images of the borehole wall. Using mathematicalcorrelation, these images are stitched together into a virtual core that is a flattenedrepresentation of the rock inside the borehole. The probe contains its own power andlight source which enables it to be deployed easily with no external wires needed foroperation. The storage capacity, image quality, and lighting design can be improvedin future design revisions.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University