ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 31 -- United States Patent no. 12,511,776, issued on Dec. 30, was assigned to Chevron U.S.A. Inc. (San Ramon, Calif.).
"Vessel sand monitoring using infrared images" was invented by Jason Robert Parizek (Midland, Texas), Andrei Sergiu Popa (Humble, Texas) and Soong Hay Tam (Houston).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Infrared images of a vessel may be obtained and analyzed to determine the amount of sand in the vessel. Portions of the infrared images with low pixel values may be filtered out as depicting background (e.g., sky, ground). Portions of the infrared images with high pixel values may be filtered out as depicting portions of the vessel without sand. The number of pix...