Diagram of reflectance gradient on leaf.

Reflections on Goldilocks, Structure from Motion, near scale remote sensing, and the special problems therein

I have been reading a bit about drone remote sensing of agriculture fields. On one hand, it’s amazing, world changing technology. On the other hand, some part of all of it is bunk. What do I mean? Well, applying techniques created for continent size analyses may not scale down well. Why? Well for one, all those clever techniques (like Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, as well as its non-normalized siblings) rely heavily on two things: 1– being on average right over a large area; 2 — painting with such a broad brush as to be difficult to confirm or refute. Continue reading Reflections on Goldilocks, Structure from Motion, near scale remote sensing, and the special problems therein

OpenDroneMap — Improvements  Needed

Talking about the future sometimes requires critiquing the present. The wonderful thing about an open source project is we can be quite open about limitations, and discuss ways forward. OpenDroneMap is a really interesting and captivating project… and there’s more work to do. To understand what work needs done, we need to understand OpenDroneMap / structure from motion in general. Some of the limitations endemic … Continue reading OpenDroneMap — Improvements  Needed

Humanitarian UAV Experts Meeting — first blush.

UAViators, MIT Lincoln Labs, UNOCHA, and others organized and hosted the UAViators Experts Meeting on MIT’s campus this weekend. It was a remarkable event, if only for the thoughtfulness and knowledge base of the people in the room. The meeting brought together UAV operators, manufacturers, humanitarians, and a few folks at the intersection of these. For me, it was relevatory with respect to all the … Continue reading Humanitarian UAV Experts Meeting — first blush.

MSF Canada Drone Day follow-up

Dirk’s MSF Canada Drone Day is officially the first blog post I have “re-blogged”. Please read: https://smathermather.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/msf-canada-drone-day/ or better yet here: http://dirkgorissen.com/2015/07/14/msf-canada-drone-day/ I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Dirk and Ivan, and the rest is well covered in Dirk’s post. It came together as an excellent day and I think you would be hard pressed to have had a better introduction to drones. The … Continue reading MSF Canada Drone Day follow-up

OpenAerialMap, OpenImageryNetwork, MapKnitter, OpenTerrain, and OpenDroneMap (cont. 1)

Citing my previous post, let’s move on to more specifics on my thoughts regarding the integration of OpenAerialMap, OpenDroneMap, and MapKnitter as projects. OpenDroneMap ❤ OpenAerialMap. OpenAerialMap will become a platform by which drone users can share their imagery under an open license. So, as the metadata spec for OpenAerialMap and OpenImageryNetwork matures, and as soon as a publicly available place for drone users to … Continue reading OpenAerialMap, OpenImageryNetwork, MapKnitter, OpenTerrain, and OpenDroneMap (cont. 1)

OpenAerialMap, OpenImageryNetwork, MapKnitter, OpenTerrain, and OpenDroneMap

This tweet: is the beginning of some fruitful discussion, I suspect. There are some really awesome projects gaining momentum. I’ll give an overview of them as best I am able. Let’s start with the one nearest and dearest to my heart (if you’ve been reading my blog, you can skip this part): OpenDroneMap. OpenDroneMap is an open source toolkit for processing drone, balloon, kite imagery … Continue reading OpenAerialMap, OpenImageryNetwork, MapKnitter, OpenTerrain, and OpenDroneMap