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
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
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
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)
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
Thanks to some brilliant work by our Interpretive Technology Technician, we now have a little video for FOSS4GNA on OpenDroneMap. Come see my presentation next week in San Francisco, Weds. at 13:30 (1:30PM): Continue reading OpenDroneMap Video for FOSS4GNA
Introduction: So much documentation to catch up on for OpenDroneMap. Probably the most important missing element is documenting the ground control point file format. This will be a file name gcp_list.txt to be placed in the root of the image directory that you are processing. Objective: The ground control point file associates locations in the input raw images with geographic positions, allowing for the output … Continue reading OpenDroneMap — GCP file format
Ok. I confess, clickbait. OpenDroneMap won’t make the animated gifs for you. But come on! it can make the 3D models which you can view in Meshlab or where ever, and then create animated gifs. Ok ok. I promised animated gifs. These are from data contributed to our test dataset repo by Aaron Racicot and Tomasz Nycz respectively. Continue reading OpenDroneMap — Now with animated GIFs
Spotscale’s texturing, orthophotos, and ground control have landed on the main branch for OpenDroneMap. No docs written yet, but an orthophoto and properly oriented textured mesh will be autogenerated just by running it on data with GPS ephemeris. Documentation yet to come on using ground control points for balloons, kites, and lower end drones, but expect that early next week. (edit: for the record, … Continue reading OpenDroneMap — Orthophotos, textured mesh, ground control points, oh my!
No docs yet for orthophoto generation and the use of GCPs in OpenDroneMap, but for the early adopters, check out this branch of OpenDroneMap: https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/OpenDroneMap/tree/ortho-gcp The format of the GCP file is simple. The header line is a description of the coordinate system (nothing formal here). Subsequent lines are the X, Y & Z coordinate in your coordinate system, your associated pixel and line number … Continue reading OpenDroneMap — Orthophotos and GCPs
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