My first orthomosaic surveys

[Pedals2Paddles]

In all the years I've been tinkering with drones, I've never actually tried doing orthomosaic surveys. I've been single, bored, and it's beautiful out. So why not. This weekend, I did three. Two are done and pictured below. The third is processing and probably won't be done until later tonight. Man this stuff takes some CPU power! But it is so cool.

I used the Solo, GoPro 4B, and Tower. Georeferenced all the photos with Mission Planner. And used the Pix4D trial to the processing for the first two below. The third one processing now, I'm trying out Drone Deploy. For the third one, I also flew the grid twice, 90 degrees offset, with the camera at 10 degrees rather than straight down. Experimenting.

First one at a vacant lot on a useless empty road the county built. Flown at 150ft, 10mph, 70% overlap, 70% sidelap. This was painfully slow to watch for someone impatient like me, but it came out great. The dog supervised, and it was a nice night to sit on the deck while it processed.

Second mission was two schools next to each other for a nice big area to fly. Also flown at 150ft, but this time at 15mph. I was worried that might be too fast, but it also came out great.

 

[ChrisBird]

In all the years I've been tinkering with drones, I've never actually tried doing orthomosaic surveys. I've been single, bored, and it's beautiful out. So why not. This weekend, I did three. Two are done and pictured below. The third is processing and probably won't be done until later tonight. Man this stuff takes some CPU power! But it is so cool.

I used the Solo, GoPro 4B, and Tower. Georeferenced all the photos with Mission Planner. And used the Pix4D trial to the processing for the first two below. The third one processing now, I'm trying out Drone Deploy. For the third one, I also flew the grid twice, 90 degrees offset, with the camera at 10 degrees rather than straight down. Experimenting.

You'll find out that straight down (or Nadir) is good for mapping accurate results. Angeled is good for structure scanning.

Cant see you pics

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[Pedals2Paddles]

I was hoping tilting up by 10 degrees was minimal enough to not affect the mapping, but make the structures stand out a little bit more in 3 dimensions.

 

[Pedals2Paddles]

oops. How about now?

 

[SteveReno]

Looks like you got the hang of it.
Go a friend that has Pix4D on a old system, he said that i can use it anytime.
They say 12 noon isa good time to capture, no shadows?
Where is there a tutorial for using our equipment with Pix4D?
TIA

 

[Pedals2Paddles]

The first one I did at 7pm, so logs of shadows. But I found it actually gives it a neat effect. The one at the school was around 5pm so the lighting was a little more even. The new one that's still processing, I did at about 2pm so the lighting was great. I agree it would definitely be best between probably 11am and 2pm.

I haven't ready any tutorials on Pix4D. But I found it rather self explanatory. I have no clue what most of the jargon and options mean. But I've managed to figure out uploading images, waiting a long time, and getting cool maps out the other end

 

[SteveReno]

Ok.
Does the Pix4D App Does all the work, Geolocation etc?

 

[Ed Beck]

Nice job!

Pix4D doesn't absolutely need the photos to be georeferenced, but it does if you want to tie it in to Google Earth or Map Tiles. Use Mission Planner to geotag the images or Geo Setter.

What interval did you use to trigger the photos?

 

[Pedals2Paddles]

I didn't, tower did that for me. Defined the survey area, told it what camera, altitude, and overlaps. And it created the grid with camera triggers.

 

[Ed Beck]

What settings did you use on your camera? When I've done surveys I've put my GoPro in medium FOV and then told Tower I was using a GoPro 3 with a medium FOV.

 

[Pedals2Paddles]

DroneDeploy just finished with the one I did of my neighborhood. 3D modeling, wow.

 

[ChrisBird]

I was hoping tilting up by 10 degrees was minimal enough to not affect the mapping, but make the structures stand out a little bit more in 3 dimensions.

Try a higher overlap for buildings and maintaining a nadir position.

Interesting to see how the 10 degree up results turn out.

I can see the pics now. Results look good. Makes you wonder with the easy workflow why 3dr felt the need to partner with autodesk....

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[Ed Beck]

I was never able to get Pix4D to do a 3D model as well as these. Good job.

I can see the pics now. Results look good. Makes you wonder with the easy workflow why 3dr felt the need to partner with autodesk....

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Closed system = more money

 

[ChrisBird]

Looks like you got the hang of it.
Go a friend that has Pix4D on a old system, he said that i can use it anytime.
They say 12 noon isa good time to capture, no shadows?
Where is there a tutorial for using our equipment with Pix4D?
TIA

I get really bad shadows outside of 11.30 to 12.45. 12 when the sun casts minimal shadows is optimal. Best if the cloud cover is consistent (that is none or light overall cover).

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[ChrisBird]

Nice job!

Pix4D doesn't absolutely need the photos to be georeferenced, but it does if you want to tie it in to Google Earth or Map Tiles. Use Mission Planner to geotag the images or Geo Setter.

What interval did you use to trigger the photos?

True. Also processing is quicker as it doesnt try to match photos that cant possibly overlapped.

You can use 3 ground control points to manually fix non geotagged photos to the real world positioning.

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[Pedals2Paddles]

Tomorrow while I'm at work, I'm going to let Pix4D chomp on the stuff I ran through DroneDeploy today. Then I can compare the two outputs to see which is better.

 

[Pedals2Paddles]

This is what the neighborhood actually looks like for real.

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[mecummings.cr]

I used Pix4d a while back to chug on a bunch of photos I took of a property down in Costa Rica. It is mostly jungle so I am sort of surprised the Pix4d software was able to put everything together (see attached image). For this, I just used the Tower app on the phone to take the shots and it worked reasonably well.

Perhaps this has been discussed previously but is there a recommended workflow to properly geotag the images using Mission Planner (if I don't have use of Pix4d) and then place the image back into a google map? Is it best to build a survey scan of a site in Mission Planner or in Tower?

Thanks for any ideas/suggestions.

 

[Jag]

Hi, nice work.

I am interested in what file type Pix4D output and how you were able to overlay that on Google Earth. Whenever I have made orthomosaics with another package they were always too large to overlay on Google Earth resulting in an error message.

Thanks

 

[Ed Beck]

My experience with Google Earth is that they shut down the site that allowed for public integration. If I have a geotaged image and a KLM file on my local it would show up on MY computer when I open Google Earth, however it didn't show up on any computer which did not have the KLM file local. Neither was I able to share the files in a central location.

I've used Mapbox which allows you to send out links to a site which will pull in tiles that you create. I've found this very useful when setting up missions around sites which were formally woods and now have a construction project I'm working at.

Looking around I found this site Tiles - OpenStreetMap Wiki. Might be something there for you.

Anyone have any other information?