Survey mapping

speatuk · Feb 21, 2017

Good evening everyone, I trust it's a good one

I have looked and searched but I am unable to find information regarding the stitching together of photos or videos after surveying.

I was wondering if someone would be as kind to either point me in the right direction or explain how to do this?

I will be using, to start with a GoPro with a PP 3.97 with NVDI for the surveying of crops in an agricultural setting.
Just to see.
My cousin has asked me to do this for him with a view pushing it out to other farmers in the area.
If all goes well, I will go down the route of a Mapair 2.

(If that's the way to go? Looking for anyone who has a bit of experience in this and, if I could have some pointers)

This is all trial and error at the moment, we want to see if it's viable and if so I will go for my CAA licence then do it commercially.
Many thanks if you can help.

I'm sure I will thank you more and more as/if you can help me.

Many thanks

-A confused Steve
(It doesn't take much to confuse me lol)

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Jubalr · Feb 21, 2017

You will probably want a cloud based solution. There are a lot of them out there but for stitching GP photos to a rough NDVI. you will probably want to use DroneDeploy.com. They have a formula for that camera to NDVI, but it's not as good as what you would get from a multi-spectral type camera. But Dronedeploy would at least allow you to get your feet wet. The biggest hassle you will have to deal with from the GP is the photos will need to be geo referenced before anything will stitch them. For that I recommend Geosetter. It's free and does an excellent job. There are videos of how to use it on YT. Desktop SW is very expensive. Pix4D is very popular SW for stitching but I use Agisoft Photoscan for some things. But you still have to geo reference the photos regardless.

Pedals2Paddles · Feb 21, 2017

I've never used geosetter before. Does it take a pixhawk dataflash log and use the cam messages to tag the photos?

Mission Planner also had the ability to geotag the images. You feed the dataflash log from the flight, and the image files. It spits out a copy of the images with geotags. That I have used and it works nicely.

speatuk · Feb 22, 2017

Jubalr said:
You will probably want a cloud based solution. There are a lot of them out there but for stitching GP photos to a rough NDVI. you will probably want to use DroneDeploy.com. They have a formula for that camera to NDVI, but it's not as good as what you would get from a multi-spectral type camera. But Dronedeploy would at least allow you to get your feet wet. The biggest hassle you will have to deal with from the GP is the photos will need to be geo referenced before anything will stitch them. For that I recommend Geosetter. It's free and does an excellent job. There are videos of how to use it on YT. Desktop SW is very expensive. Pix4D is very popular SW for stitching but I use Agisoft Photoscan for some things. But you still have to geo reference the photos regardless.

Thanks for this.
Talk about getting my feet wet, I still have my wellies on. Lol

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

speatuk · Feb 22, 2017

Pedals2Paddles said:
I've never used geosetter before. Does it take a pixhawk dataflash log and use the cam messages to tag the photos?

Mission Planner also had the ability to geotag the images. You feed the dataflash log from the flight, and the image files. It spits out a copy of the images with geotags. That I have used and it works nicely.

Looks like I need to get my pc skills back up to speed

Thanks P2P

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Jubalr · Feb 22, 2017

Pedals2Paddles said:
I've never used geosetter before. Does it take a pixhawk dataflash log and use the cam messages to tag the photos?

Mission Planner also had the ability to geotag the images. You feed the dataflash log from the flight, and the image files. It spits out a copy of the images with geotags. That I have used and it works nicely.

Yes, Geosetter needs the Tlogs and photos, but a big difference in how they are applied. I have never had much success with MP and the accuracy of the stamps. Even when some user will use MP, they will still take the tagged images into GS to tune the stamps. Geosetter allows you to overlay the tlog track on a sat image and align the images with where they should be. It will then tag the images for use in stitching SW.

Pedals2Paddles · Feb 22, 2017

Interesting. It's always worked good for me. But I'll have to try it with geosetter and compare. It sounds like a more powerful geotagging process.

Jubalr · Feb 22, 2017

It is Matt. Check out this video. It's the best for getting started and he actually starts with MP to tag then brings them into GS. You can see the difference and why. Images were taken with a Mapir on Solo.

AOtarolaR · Jun 26, 2017

Jubalr said:
Yes, Geosetter needs the Tlogs and photos, but a big difference in how they are applied. I have never had much success with MP and the accuracy of the stamps. Even when some user will use MP, they will still take the tagged images into GS to tune the stamps. Geosetter allows you to overlay the tlog track on a sat image and align the images with where they should be. It will then tag the images for use in stitching SW.

Hi Julbar..
is there a way to work directly with a .tlog file on geosetter? )

Jubalr · Jun 26, 2017

AOtarolaR said:
Hi Julbar..
is there a way to work directly with a .tlog file on geosetter? )

It's an option in Mission Planner. Under the Tlog tab you will see the option to convert.

IrishmanPDX · Aug 9, 2017

I'm looking forward to doing some surveying of my property, however I have a problem that it's mostly uphill, but it has some dips and valleys in it. So really need to get some proper height measurements before I can map it properly. So.... who's working on AGL radar assisted flight?

just_bruce · Aug 9, 2017

LIDAR is the way to go for that. And if you're on AP Master, I think it has support for laser rangefinders and LIDAR.

IrishmanPDX · Aug 11, 2017

On AP Master? Actually I'm on a chair... boom boom! I did look it up and apparently there is support for Laser Rangefinders and Lidar but it's more for object avoidance than maintaining a certain height during a survey mission (unless I was reading outdated info?). Anyway, I have an idea of how to do the first survey roughly, once I get the hang of that I'll do a more indepth study of the ridges and dips and try to work out a much better survey mission that takes those different heights into account. This is all just testing the waters for missions and what I can do with them. I'm doing a lot of "offline" planning and playing about to see what works and what doesn't when I get back out to the property. So next up, how to remove those ultra strong magnets from the back of LED Smart Badges. Thinking that having a scrolling message on the Solo would make for some fun video shout outs!