Patent ID: 9711038
Date: 2017-07-18
CPC Classifications: G01F,G01N,G08C,H04Q

Claim:
1. A method for determining a fill level of a container, the method comprising: acquiring first impulse data; reformatting the acquired first impulse data into a first subset of the acquired first impulse data, the first subset comprising a plurality of subset times, wherein the first subset includes fewer data points than the first impulse data; acquiring second impulse data; reformatting the acquired second impulse data into a second subset of the acquired second impulse data, wherein the second subset includes fewer data points than the second impulse data; computing the fill level based on the first and the second impulse data subsets; computing a first impulse arrival time based on at least one of the plurality of subset times; computing a second impulse arrival time based on at least one of the plurality of second subset times; and computing the fill level based on the first and second impulse arrival times; wherein computing the second impulse arrival time based on at least one of the plurality of second subset times further comprises: acquiring, by an acoustic impulse receiver, reference impulse data; and reformatting the acquired reference impulse data into a reference subset of the acquired reference impulse data, the reference subset comprising a plurality of reference amplitude values that correspond to a plurality of reference times; and wherein reformatting the acquired second impulse data further comprises: reformatting the acquired second impulse data so that the second subset includes a plurality of second impulse data amplitude values that correspond to the plurality of second subset times; determining an offset value by computing a cross-correlation between the second subset and the reference subset; selecting one of the plurality of second subset times as the impulse arrival time based on the offset value.