Discontinuity Mapping of Rocks Using Commercial Quadcopter Images

Abstract

A Mountain is a large landform that upsurges above the adjoining land surface in a limited area, most commonly in the form of peaks driven by tectonic forces and volcanism. The basic mountains types formed by tectonic plates include block, volcanic and fold mountains. As portions of Earth's crust move and crumple, an uplift pressure is created by compressional forces which intrudes the igneous matter and forces the rock surface upwards, resulting in the creation of landform referred as mountains. The degree of height of the landform classifies it into a hill or, if the elevation is higher and steeper, a mountain. The outcrop of mountain encompasses all or some of joints, bedding planes, cleavage, fractures, and zones of shear collectively known as discontinuity. The measurement of discontinuity orientations is of absolute importance in evaluating the discontinuous rock slopes stability and behavior of rock mass because of their use as input in discontinuity modelling programs and methods. Commonly, Discontinuity orientations are gauged manually with the help of a compass. In this day and age, this manual method has its fair share of drawbacks which include the fact that this method is slow, tiring, and a serious threat of physical danger looms from rock falls and landslides. Also this method can yield inaccurate results due to the fact that scaling of heights and its measurements are restricted to accessible areas only. Nexus to above, this research is aimed at detection, mapping and then characterization of discontinuities with remotely sensed data and GIS applications. Research analysis was based on data acquisition, image processing, lineament extraction, raster analysis of Digital elevation model and Geometrical calculations in GIS to extract discontinuity and its characterization. The research was based on data from United States Geological Survey earth explorer application available free worldwide. The results obtained were compared with obtained from digitization of Geological maps of area of study. The inherent inaccuracies and deviations were identified with reasons of their occurrence. The recommendations were made in response to reasons causing inaccuracies to carve precise results. The research of was carried out with limitations in accuracy of free data available and software on trial license