We have a drone at work DJI mini pro3, that was only used to take commercial pictures. Now I want to use the drone to take pictures of a terrain were we plan to build a new waste water plant (also in commercial phase)
It does not have to be that accurate, but as accurate as possible with the tools we have (the drone and printed GCP's). Afterwards, I will have the pictures loaded into an online platform (realitycapture or nira.app alike) to make a model of it.
If I print a few GCP on paper and place them on the terrain. How can I determine their positions without a GNNS stick?
Measure the GCP locations as accurately as possible.using a survey-grade GPS or other accurate measurement techniques.
What are the other cheaper techniques?
drone & GCP
-
ScottErnst
- I have made 70-80 posts
- Posts: 76
- Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 2:31 am
- 6
- Full Name: Scott Ernst
- Company Details: Southwest Scanning
- Company Position Title: owner
- Country: United States
- Linkedin Profile: No
- Has thanked: 3 times
- Been thanked: 12 times
Re: drone & GCP
If it doesn't need to be geolocated or super accurate, all you have to do is measure the distance between 2 points that can be seen in multiple photos (maybe 5 - 10), put that measurement into the software as a scale constraint and it will scale the whole project. You could just put out 2 targets and measure between them. I've scaled projects using 50cm scale bars with good results, but something like 25' would be better.
Flying a double grid will help with camera calibration and will give you a better model.
Flying a double grid will help with camera calibration and will give you a better model.
-
gordonired
- Forum Supporter
- Posts: 129
- Joined: Thu Mar 09, 2017 4:27 pm
- 6
- Full Name: Gordon
- Company Details: Roska DBO
- Company Position Title: GIS Coordinator
- Country: Canada
- Linkedin Profile: Yes
- Location: Alberta
- Has thanked: 17 times
- Been thanked: 27 times
Re: drone & GCP
I was able to demo a GNSS unit at our office, and get some data points around our yard, which is about 12 acres in size. From those initial points I went about and surveyed in a total of 12 GCP's. I flew a little mavic 2 mini around and captured maybe a thousand photos from different angles etc. I really struggled to get the dataset to come together.
RealityCapture was a nightmare, I could get it down to 3 or 4 good "clusters", but I couldn't merge them successfully. I thought what the heck I'll try doing it on the cloud next. DroneDeploy was my first attempt. It came together quite nicely actually, and I only used a few GCP's. In the end it didn't play nicely with the projection system that I was told the GCP's were in, so I just ignored that I even had them, and told it to run with just the photos. The final product was good enough for me. I was able to overlay the model in CAD with my surveyed points, and they were at worst ~10cm out. I would never built anything off of our drone data, but I was happy that I could get some result out of my little experiment.
I'd say give DroneDeploy in a try, it's got a free trial which is nice.
RealityCapture was a nightmare, I could get it down to 3 or 4 good "clusters", but I couldn't merge them successfully. I thought what the heck I'll try doing it on the cloud next. DroneDeploy was my first attempt. It came together quite nicely actually, and I only used a few GCP's. In the end it didn't play nicely with the projection system that I was told the GCP's were in, so I just ignored that I even had them, and told it to run with just the photos. The final product was good enough for me. I was able to overlay the model in CAD with my surveyed points, and they were at worst ~10cm out. I would never built anything off of our drone data, but I was happy that I could get some result out of my little experiment.
I'd say give DroneDeploy in a try, it's got a free trial which is nice.