Seamless integration between Imago and hardware provided by one of our partners, and tested by us.
Capturing high-quality images of your diamond core is essential to any drilling project. Additionally, imaging your drilling chips holds immense value for documentation, geological interpretation, and communication. Ensuring a record of these chip as photos contributes to their longevity and facilitates future reference. With Imago you can capture and store chip photos that are consistent, easily tagged and labelled, and saved in a secure online cloud environment where the images can be linked to other data such as geological models.
Imago integrates with automated imaging hardware devices to streamline the process of imaging chips. Using these devices with Imago’s capturing software simplifies the chip-tray capture process, quickly producing many high-quality images across chip trays in one scan, then transferring and storing them in your Imago cloud.
Using Imago with these devices is an excellent way of using technology to make processes easier while also delivering outstanding value through reliability, minimising human mistakes, and improving efficiency – which all together enables you to extract maximum knowledge and insights from your chips.
Automating this process reduces the manual handling of images by a field team, resulting in a lower risk of error in your dataset, consistency when sharing information with stakeholders and the ability to make business critical decisions faster.
As the industry moves towards machine learning to further improve workflows, having clean, standardised data is essential.
Key Features and Benefits
Fast and Reliable
Imago increases the speed and reliability which images are captured – this is further maximised with automated hardware which can capture multiple images hands free.
Ensure accuracy and high standards
The images are captured to the same conditions each time, not affected by different lighting, shadows or distance from the camera. This consistency allows for a digital asset to be created that is crucial for maintaining an accurate record of samples.
Automated
The workflow is automated to allow geologists to spend more time analysing the data and making critical decisions, rather than photographing chips. The automated cropping of chip trays saves times and further supports the consistency of each data set captured.
Seequent Integration through Imago
Imago integrates with the Seequent ecosystem of modelling, data management and visualisation products including Leapfrog, MX Deposit and Central. Capturing images with Imago means geological imagery is instantly available to team members for collaboration and accessible directly from other Seequent solutions.
Hardware
Our friends at Dynamics G-Ex have two options for capturing chip trays with Imago.
Their automated Discoverer Auto RC Chip Photography Station is a portable automated imaging station that can capture 20 individual compartments in just over one minute. With the ability to capture 50 trays within an hour, you can spend more time focusing on geology rather than manually capturing your chips. You can see this in action here.
For those operating with a smaller volume of chips or when one photograph per compartment is not required, Dynamics G-Ex’s RC Chip Tray Sample Photography Imaging Station is a great option. This budget-friendly option is portable, easy to assemble and allows you to capture images in 30 seconds anywhere on the go. For the best results, we recommend capturing 4-5 cells in one photo.
Alternatively, Westernex offer the Chip Tray Camera Frame which can capture sections of your trays, ensuring quality and consistency. With a wide base, you are able to easily slide the trays to each section.