Problem Overview: One of the greatest challenges with OpenDroneMap (ODM) is getting great results out of sparse data. I used to describe this as getting good data out of mediocre inputs, but this isn’t a fair descriptor, and here I’ll make a public apology: just because I have the time to fly with lots of overlap most of the time doesn’t mean it should be … Continue reading Upcoming improvements to OpenDroneMap — Better everything.
This is an interesting application for ODM that is close to my heart: using it to process historical imagery into elevation models for geomorphological mapping: http://community.opendronemap.org/t/minimum-number-of-overlapping-images-for-point-cloud-generation/514/6 Continue reading OpenDroneMap for non-drone applications
It’s 3 days until proposals are due for FOSS4G Dar, the first FOSS4G on the continent since Capetown in 2008. Submit! This is one you don’t want to miss. The hospitality of East Africa is outstanding; Tanzania is a beautiful country; and there’s lots of great and interesting work to be learned about and collaborated on in Dar and Zanzibar. This is a huge opportunity … Continue reading Come to Tanzania: FOSS4G 2018 Dar
This one is short, merely a belated link to Frederick Mbuya’s much more detailed UhuruLabs blog post on the same trip: http://uhurulabs.org/2018/02/16/opendronemap-and-uhurulabs-do-kerela/ Continue reading OpenDroneMap and Uhuru Labs in Kerala, India — another post
While I was in East Africa, I made a quick side trip to Dar to visit with some compatriots also interested in drones for good — specifically Frederick Mbuya of UhuruNet, UhuruFly, UhuruLabs, and World Bank Tanzania (etc.) , as well as Ivan Gayton, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Tanzania, Missing Maps, formerly MSF UK (etc). We chatted about tech, development, drones for good, and played … Continue reading Dar visit, drone fun
I was on my way to Rwanda to do some more work with Karisoke Research Institute on Gorillas, help close out some research worked on by University of Rwanda botany student Tuyizere Jean de Deiu on how land use and land cover have changed between 1995 and present. More on that project in a later post. In the meantime, while passing through Europe, I took … Continue reading Apis helvetica var. Jacques
The State of Kerala, India has the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) an autonomous institution “mandated with the objectives of co-ordinating FOSS initiatives within Kerala, as well as linking up with FOSS initiatives in other parts of the world in order to push the agenda of promoting democratic access to information and knowledge through equitable models of production and distribution of … Continue reading OpenDroneMap and Uhuru Labs in Kerala, India
An increasing desired use case for OpenDroneMap is to use it for non-drone maps. For example: I have a bucket of scanned images from the 1950’s. I want to make them into a mosaic. I have the geographic center for each image. Can I process these in OpenDroneMap? I have a bucket of individually orthorectified images from a sensor like from the Wildfire Airborne Sensor Program … Continue reading Orthophotos from orthophotos?
The last two days, I have been working with Olivier Jean Leonce Manzi here at Karisoke Research Center on the question of the relationship between gorilla food plants biomass and the ranging patterns of gorillas outside Volcanoes National Park (VNP) in Rwanda. Even though Volcanoes National Park is set aside and gorillas thrive inside, they don’t strictly stay within the bounds of the park — … Continue reading Gorilla Food Plants Biomass and Ranging
The Zanzibar Mapping Initiative is the largest civilian drone mapping project in the world — an ambitious project to map the Zanzibar Archipelago using a whole host of eBee drones. The project is nearing completion of mapping Unguja, the larger of the two main islands. Because of the large area to be covered, ZMI required an approach to partition the data into manageable flight areas. … Continue reading ZMI — Zanzibar Mapping Initiative Level 1
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