Comment by MarcS on February 14, 2012 at 1:48pm

Hi,

could you explain a little more whats the main intention of the project? Image processing is a nice thing, but if its open source why upload all the images to process? Are you providing a cluster? Will you collect the results for a beginning of a "free google earth" which is probably hard to achieve because people fly in special interest areas mostly not interesting to tohers...

I really like the idea of an easy to use image processing, but why make it a web service and not an open source program project?

I´ll keep looking :-) got many images here which would like to be stitched... (Most of them without coordinates, would this work?)

Cheers, Marc

Comment by JP on February 14, 2012 at 1:59pm

Hi Marc,

Thanks for your comments. Our intention is to further the use of aerial imagery and UAV/drone technology -- we are hooked. Also, provide a cool place for us and others to upload, track and building imagery of their UAV flights. If that makes sense. :) We are also providing the software and backend server processing power to automated the process of building these mosaics and georeferenced mosaics. This took me the better of 3 months full time to work out and test. Once the site is live, it will live on a large Amazon cloud server. Most likely 64bit with a large amount of memory to blend mosaics and do the required processing we need. These can be costly depending on the traffic amounts/cpu needs.

I like your idea of providing a free google earth, but I feel like the users of the site may or may not want to have their imagery viewable by all. Who knows though?

One of the main reasons it is a web server is the complexity of the backend and the multiple programming languages and tools used. Plus, we haven't noticed any other web services like this yet. Pix4d is close.

The software will compare images to flight logs, so if you have corresponding gps/alt/heading/etc data for the images it will work. It will also read this information from EXIF GPS data if needed. Please realize that this is really early, and I am pretty much the sole developer -- so I hope with more flight data, imagery, users and our own flight platforms it will improve. :)  

Many thanks,

JP

Comment by JP on February 14, 2012 at 2:12pm

Additionally, the software blending works with openCV and control points so it will also work with coordinates. Of course the GeoTiff building wouldn't work at all. Another reason, we are looking at this as a web service is it uses technologies like geoserver to display certain data layers. Thanks again

Comment by arthur.benemann on February 14, 2012 at 3:01pm

Just waiting for the server to be running to test some photos. The interface (looking at the pictures at least) is amazing.

Comment by JP on February 14, 2012 at 3:11pm

@arthur.benemann Thanks! We should have a public server and beta up within a month or sooner. :) My hope is during the beta we get even more image sets to test and refine our process with. It works pretty well at this point, but accuracy is sometimes limited by the GPS/IMU/etc sensors on the UAV. I am working on a workflow/method to georeference the blended tif files based off of control imagery downloaded via WMS. Really cool stuff!

Comment by arthur.benemann on February 14, 2012 at 3:21pm

The software will generate a DEM ?  If not, is it a planned feature?

Comment by JP on February 14, 2012 at 3:25pm

Hi, yes currently it will generate a DEM hillshade, color relief and more. I just got this part working today actually. I don't know how accurate or correct it is yet but you can view them above in one of the screenshots. I would love to implement the following method as well sometime: http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/making-digital-elevations?xg_sour... Thx JP

Comment by JP on February 14, 2012 at 3:29pm

 

(right click - view image for full size png)

Comment by Ross on February 14, 2012 at 7:28pm

Nice post JP and the screenshots look good!

Hats off to everyone who has posted nice flight paths and sequential tiles. I have been trying to provide imagery from my tricopter for JP to test with for about 2 months and still don't have any photos worth showing. Very close hopefully.

The website JP made is very cool for APM pilots and GIS folks. If you have a .gpx file or Ardu Pilot log to go with your images...you get them geo-referenced, download them in a couple different formats...and load into ArcMap if you want.  

Also since its hosted in a cloud...imagery can be captured, geo-referenced, and available on the web within minutes if you have an internet connection. That is pretty cool!

Nice work JP!!!

 

 

Comment by James masterman on February 14, 2012 at 8:34pm

This looks really good, I'd be keen to be a beta tester when the time comes. Will you be able to provide information such as an estimate of accuracy in the results? I like the relatively seamless connection to APM by making use of the log file.

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