ABSTRACT
The expansion of measurement capabilities often depends upon new technology development. Early days in fragmentation measurement (passive visual assessments rather than active sieving of material) involved counting boulders or visually comparing the muck with photographs of piles of rocks with known distributions as in the Compaphoto technique (van Aswegen & Cunningham 1986). The advent and proliferation of personal computers has facilitated an explosion in measurement capability. The transition from analogue to digital data acquisition was underway. Digital cameras began to be widely adopted in the mid to late 1990s. Computer processing power continued to increase rapidly according to Moores Law and image processing algorithms became the standard for processing digital images of rock fragmentation for particle size distribution analysis (Latham et al. 2003).
