Crowdsourcing Point Clouds for Disaster Response

3689645155?profile=original

Point Clouds, or 3D models derived from high resolution aerial imagery, are in fact nothing new. Several software platforms already exist to reconstruct a series of 2D aerial images into fully fledged 3D-fly-through models. Check out these very neat examples from my colleagues at Pix4D and SenseFly:CastleJesus and Matterhorn. But what does a castle, Jesus and a mountain have to do with humanitarian action? As noted in my previous blog post (on the World Bank's use of UAVs in response to Cyclone Pam), there’s only so much disaster damage one can glean from nadir (that is, vertical) imagery and oblique imagery. Lets suppose that the nadir image below was taken by an orbiting satellite or flying UAV right after an earthquake, for example. How can you possibly assess disaster damage from this one picture alone? Even if you had nadir imagery for these houses before the earthquake, your ability to assess structural damage would be limited.

Continue reading here...

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones