What makes dronedeploy so fast?

Posted by RG on July 24, 2015 at 8:22pm

I am a newbie, but looking at various photo stitching mosaic creation software and it appears it takes LOT of time in processing.

What does DroneDeploy uses as their backend software/infrastructure which makes it almost realtime?

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  • Phil Ellerbroek July 24, 2015 at 9:39pm
    Oh...and ps. Good luck flying a fixed wing at 200 feet agl st cruise speed (usually 20-30 meters/second) and getting proper overlap for creating orthos. Off the shelf sensors, including Sony, won't trigger shutters fast enough, especially for corect NDVI pixel averaging. This is a serious mapping challenge for anyone operating a legal section 333 fixed wing mapping plane in the US at the legal altitude, even at 400 ft was well.
    • Darrell Burkey > Phil Ellerbroek July 24, 2015 at 9:41pm

      People here are doing that at 120 meters with no problem at all for 4cm/pixel resolution. As for compressing images, that's the last think you want to do when mapping. You really should be shooting raw to avoid all the artefacts that compression causes.

    • Eddie W > Darrell Burkey July 25, 2015 at 7:01am

      Over here in the UK, DroneDeploy's Copilot is not available, so it is not possible to use their service with 3dr flight controllers. I would have to invest in a DJI Inspire 1 to use it!

      Are there any alternatives out there for "real time" stitching for mapping when flying with APM or Pixhawk?

    • RG > Eddie W July 25, 2015 at 2:35pm

      Not really realtime but I am thinking of setting up a large cloud cluster to process such requests. Instead of using our local tiny machines, this cluster would be able to produce results much faster.

      Checkout some sample results I got by processing about 166 images texture and ply files which can be viewed on free software like MeshLab

      https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6xqlv1ryzzz40js/AACaHEPI4TpD63gTOX_emxxL...

      Let me know if this would be of your interest.

      Seneca
      Shared with Dropbox
  • Phil Ellerbroek July 24, 2015 at 9:35pm
    One can move and process ANY data quickly if it is compressed and quality is degraded, especially imagery. Nothing novel there. Of course, this assumes one accepts the limitations of using a very limited selection of available sensors, and that you have 4G cell service when you need it.
  • Darrell Burkey July 24, 2015 at 9:14pm

    Is it that fast? When I looked at it the fast part was just low res initial results. Although I'm sure they have a lot more grunt available for processing that I ever would. But the real problem for me, and a lot of Australians, is that our bandwidth is piss poor thanks to our politicians hijacking the issue. I'd hate to think what it would cost me to transfer a mapping job with 4G which is the best bandwidth I can get and even that would take hours I'm sure. Hopefully I'm wrong about this and others in Australia have worked out a way to do this. Cheers.

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