Background I have been giving a lot of thought to sustainable ways to handle self calibration of cameras without undue additional time added to flights. For many projects, I have the luxury of spending a little more time to collect more data, but for larger projects, this isn’t a sustainable model. In a couple of previous posts (this one and this one), we started to … Continue reading Self Calibration of Cameras from Drone Flights (part 3)
(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)
(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
Edit: forgot the camera array: CIR image from balloon: Continue reading Kite flight (too windy for balloons, ahem “aerostats”)
In my previous post on Getting Bundler and friends running, I suggested how to modify an existing script to get Bundler and other structure from motion parts/pieces up and running. Here’s my follow up. Install Vagrant and VirtualBox. Download (or clone) this repo: https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/odm-vagrant Navigate into the cloned or unzipped directory (on the command line), run vagrant up Go have a cup of coffee. Come … Continue reading Getting Bundler and friends running — part deux
Anyone who has jumped down the rabbit hole of computer vision has run into dependency h*ll getting software to run. I jumped down that hole again today with great success that I don’t want to forget (these directions are for Ubuntu, fyi). First, clone BundlerTools: https://github.com/qwesda/BundlerTools This will download and compile (almost) everything for you, which is a wonderful thing. The one exception is graclus. … Continue reading Getting Bundler and friends running
I have been contemplating all sorts of varied uses of Structure from Motion techniques. One of those outputs, in addition to using sUAVs (drones) is just to orthorectify and generate 3D meshes from ordinary photos. This has really great potential for linear assets like streams and rivers, trails and roads. We’ll have to being to contemplate how we’ll use (and summarize!) the incredible amount of … Continue reading Inventorying linear assets– really high resolution orthos
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