Urgent Task (UAV)

Hi everyone, Thanks for getting in touch - here are some details: Background: We are looking more and more on how to automate the extraction of useful data from our drone imagery. Task details: One task that has emerged for the calculation of waste and residue in the forestry sector is to automate the calculation of pile volumes (see screenshot example below for a pile shown in drone imagery). When an area is mapped with a drone and we process the data with photogrammetry software, these piles have (3D) heights... since we generate a point cloud (XYZ / ASCII file) every time we process. See 2nd screenshot to see that there is height data with that same pile in the foreground. I'm not sure how much programming you have done that has involved spatial data (orthophoto mosaics, digital terrain models, etc). The volume of these piles only needs to be rough. With traditional methods, a basic shape of the perimeter of the pile is determined along with top height and a rough volume is obtained. I'm open to different approaches here. Our photogrammetry software is Agisoft Metashape, where you can manually calculate volumes. You can also do this with a volume tool in Pix4D (the other photogrammetry software leader). Some people are also doing similar tasks with MapBox (example: [login to view URL]) End Goal - the whole idea here that we can hopefully accomplish is that we can take any orthophoto (GeoTIFF file) and XYZ file / DTM, no matter who captures this data with a drone, and plug that data into a tool to extract volumes. If it's semi-automated I guess that could work with that too... but in a perfect world it would be great if we have a public-facing tool that people could upload drone imagery too, and get volumes in return. If that involves some interaction from me that is fine but let me know what you think it possible with reasonable effort. With my wonderful rant above, please give me an estimate on time/cost involved in this and unknowns from your perspective. Here is some data to take a look at / work from that was used to generate the screenshots. Also there are a bunch of scripts that people have created for Agisoft Metashape ... but I don't want to throw you off on the best method of coding from your perspective, just thought I would mention that repository in case you have to tie this into our photogrammetry software.