A borrow pit is an area where soil and/or rock is removed, added or both for use at some other location (for example, in obtaining fill dirt for highway construction projects). The arrangements for borrow pits usually requires auditing the amount of material change in the pit (volumetric change).
A point cloud derived from dense image matching (DIM) from imagery collected by a small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) is ideal for this application. The sUAS is flown prior to the start of operations to collect a baseline. The sUAS is reflown each time a new borrow computation is desired. This method is economical and non-disruptive (since the flight time for most borrow pits will be less than ½ hour).