Automatic Volume Estimation of Timber from Multi-View Stereo 3D Reconstruction

The ability to automatically estimate the volume of timber is becoming increasingly important within the timber industry. The large number of timber trucks arriving each day at Swedish timber terminals fortifies the need for a volume estimation performed in real-time and on-the-go as the trucks arrive. This thesis investigates if a volumetric integration of disparity maps acquired from a Multi-View Stereo (MVS) system is a suitable approach for automatic volume estimation of timber loads. As real-time execution is preferred, efforts were made to provide a scalable method. The proposed method was quantitatively evaluated on datasets containing two geometric objects of known volume. A qualitative comparison to manual volume estimates of timber loads was also made on datasets recorded at a Swedish timber terminal. The proposed method is shown to be both accurate and precise under specific circumstances. However, robustness is poor to varying weather conditions, although a more thorough evaluation of this aspect needs to be performed. The method is also parallelizable, which means that future efforts can be made to significantly decrease execution time