Category: 3D

3D, Camera Calibration, OpenDroneMap, Optics, Photogrammetry

Self Calibration of Cameras from Drone Flights (part 2)

(Modified excerpt from the OpenDroneMap docs) In a previous post on camera calibration, we discussed the possibility of setting up calibration flights that have the following characteristics: non-parallel (converging) flightlines of 20° with a 5° forward facing camera (assuming 0° is nadir). With OpenDroneMap’s –camera parameter, we can thus import camera models from a calibration flight and use that in a more efficiently flown “traditional” … Continue reading Self Calibration of Cameras from Drone Flights (part 2)

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3D, OpenDroneMap, Photogrammetry

Self Calibration of Cameras from Drone Flights

(Modified excerpt from the OpenDroneMap docs) Calibrating the Camera Camera calibration is a special challenge with commodity cameras. Temperature changes, vibrations, focus, and other factors can affect the derived parameters with substantial effects on resulting data. Automatic or self calibration is possible and desirable with drone flights, but depending on the flight pattern, automatic calibration may not remove all distortion from the resulting products. James … Continue reading Self Calibration of Cameras from Drone Flights

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3D, Drone, Kerala, OpenDroneMap, Photogrammetry, UAS

Kole Wetland Canal Mapping with ClusterODM

My friends and collegues at International Center for Free and Open Source Software in Kerala, India have done a pretty interesting and massive mapping initiative over Thrissur Kole Wetlands. The wetlands are a massive 30,000+ acre area that are both important to wildlife and provide rice production. Suman Rajan, Asish Abraham, and Deepthi Patric (left to right in image below) mapped 9000 acres of it. … Continue reading Kole Wetland Canal Mapping with ClusterODM

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3D, OpenDroneMap, Other

NodeMICMAC – a new WebODM Node

(Originally posted at OpenDroneMap Blog) Origins OpenDroneMap has an origins story rooted in a joke: While the last decade has been dominated by the growing hegemony of the global base map, mapping will swing now for a while towards the principle of mapping the world, one organic pixel at a time. 2014 is the beginning of artisanal satellite mapping, where we discover the value in 1-inch pixels from … Continue reading NodeMICMAC – a new WebODM Node

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View of the sea crashing on the Kerala shore
3D, Kerala, OpenDroneMap, Other

Keralite Klusters

One of the problems we worked on in Kerala wasn’t a drone problem at all, but an infrastructure problem. Given a distribution of locales, how can we cluster those according to distance to help reduced duplicated infrastructure services (internet, electricity, etc.)? There are lots of ways to solve this, but we chose to do it in PostGIS because… Ok: because that’s what I always often do … Continue reading Keralite Klusters

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3D, Kerala, OpenDroneMap, Other

From the Sultanate to the Keralites

It has been a busy few weeks of travel for me. With a short trip to Unmanned Vehicle Systems Oman (UVS-Oman) behind me, I had the pleasure of continuing on to Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India to work on more unmanned vehicle problems. You may recall from 2018 a trip that Frederick Mbuya and I took at the outset of drone program development for the International Center … Continue reading From the Sultanate to the Keralites

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3D, Conferences, OpenDroneMap, Other, UVS-Oman

The first UVS Oman

The first annual Unmanned Vehicle Systems Oman recently finished in Muscat and was by all counts a success. It was a small but potent conference (which is an important combo for ambitious firsts), the hosting was quite exemplary, the space (the campus of Sultan Qaboos University) exquisite, and the talks were a wonderful stretch for me both into areas I don’t think much about, like controller design … Continue reading The first UVS Oman

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3D, OpenDroneMap, Other

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

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3D, OpenDroneMap, Other

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

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3D, OpenDroneMap, OpenDroneMap, Other

Upcoming improvements to OpenDroneMap — Better everything.

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.

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