Classifying point clouds with CGAL

There exist all sorts of interesting point cloud classification approaches, many of them open source and accessible. A set of particularly interesting ones have been released recently via the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library, or CGAL. The description of the CGAL from their web page is as follows: CGAL is a software project that provides easy access to efficient and reliable geomeric algorithms in the form of a … Continue reading Classifying point clouds with CGAL

Better 3D all the time

Reblogged from the OpenDroneMap blog. Recent posts have detailed the improvements in the digital elevation products from OpenDroneMap that are forthcoming, and we are really excited about those. That code is now relatively mature and likely usable for your use case, with only a couple of caveats: The first caveat is that the processing for point clouds takes 3-4 times as long. That said, the … Continue reading Better 3D all the time

Digital Elevation Model Improvements, cont. with code!

(Reblogged from the OpenDroneMap blog) Ok, so far what is available is broken code but that will be fixed.  You can check it out in the meantime in this pull request. It calculates the full depthmaps, but does not yet write the PLY file needed for subsequent steps. The trick to improve DEMs was already in our build process: for elevation models, MVE’s dmrecon utility … Continue reading Digital Elevation Model Improvements, cont. with code!

Water runs downhill

(Originally published here: https://www.opendronemap.org/2018/11/water-runs-downhill/) Water running downhill is a challenge for elevation models derived from drone imagery. This is for a variety of reasons, some fixable, some unavoidable. The unavoidable ones include the challenges of digital terrain models derived from photogrammetric point clouds, which don’t penetrate the way LiDAR does. The avoidable ones we seek to fix in OpenDroneMap.   The fixable problems include poorly … Continue reading Water runs downhill

Women and FOSS4G / HOT Summit in Africa

I had the privilege last summer of attending State of the Map Africa, and getting some insight into the status of OpenStreetMap on the continent. This year, almost as a followup, FOSS4G Dar es Salaam was held in conjunction with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Summit. And so it was that FOSS4G this year was one part FOSS4G, one part HOT, and one part Tanzania, all … Continue reading Women and FOSS4G / HOT Summit in Africa

DroneTZ — FOSS4G and HOT Summit in Tanzania

I am just returning from a couple weeks in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar in Tanzania. It was a really busy and inspiring sequence of workshops, meetings, and the annual Free and Open Source for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference. I have a stack of info and experiences to process, but let me just drop a little of that out here for all of you. The trip … Continue reading DroneTZ — FOSS4G and HOT Summit in Tanzania