German technology company Fovea develops smartphone app to calculate value of log stacks; claims product takes two minutes to count logs, cubic meters, by photo-optically measuring log numbers and thickness

Wendy Lisney

DUNEDIN, New Zealand , March 28, 2014 (Friday Offcuts) – An idea that saves time and machines, and then money in the end as well, is always welcome. That’s why a new idea spawned by the German HAWK founder team is currently attracting a lot of attention in the wood industry.

The new smartphone app the company says is able to very quickly calculate the value of any woodpile. FOVEA is the name of a young company that is being financially supported from the German Federal Ministry of Economics.

Up until now, anyone who wanted to know the price of a stack of logs in the forest usually had to count all the logs individually, then measure and calculate the volume. This takes time. This new app needs only approximately two minutes to count the logs, the cubic meters and the stacked cubic meters for an average log pile.

The wood is measured photo-optically in several steps; a panorama photo then appears on the display, and finally the number of logs appears according to thickness along with the data on solid cubic metres and stacked cubic meters, on the basis of which the price can then be calculated. In addition to the advantage of saving time, the app can also – if used for larger areas – serve to simplify and standardize wood logistics.

The savings potential for the wood industry is enormous – and that applies all over the world confirms Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bernd Stock from the HAWK Faculty for Natural Sciences and Technology: “The app is a real technological innovation; it uses elements from digital image processing and calculates this information on a smartphone.”

Manfred Ide, Managing Director of Fovea has already introduced the project at national and international wood fairs and it has been attracting a lot of interest from South African, Brazilian, Spanish and Russian forest products companies.

As part of the upcoming Wood Flow Logistics 2014 series running in Rotorua, New Zealand on 11-12 June and again in Melbourne on 17-18 June, the company behind the app will briefly outline the technology, what it can do and how it is being used. Full details of both programmes can be found on the event website, www.woodflowlogistics.com.

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