Comments

• 

  LanMark March 20, 2013 at 8:40pm

  David can you explain the advantages of using one of the Tetracam's over say a modified camera that MaxMax has?  At $3800 the camera for a lot of people is out of their price range especially to fly on something that could easily crash... and at 3.2MP camera sensor it seems rather high.   I also am not sure what sort of output you get with these cameras since most image handling/processing is to a RGB spec not a 4 channel output.
  
  I don't work for maxmax or anything but have seen some pretty amazing results at a fraction of the price.. or a price that you don't freak out at thinking that the thing could fall out of the sky and ruin a 3800 dollar camera.
  
  The 3.2MP sensor seems for the price seems problematic for doing large coverage areas.
  
  So I was wondering if you could shed some light on the advantages of the equipment you resell.. and if you could justify the $3200 price difference.  I think most of the consumers of the NDVI data would using it more for a trending tool and way to point out problem areas then an exact science / accurate ndvi indexing... or at least seems like it.
• 100KM

  keeyen pang March 20, 2013 at 7:58pm

  I'm very great to joint this group. UAV will be very useful especially in the area of remote sensing. I'm involve in aerial mapping for our local oil palm plantation, here is a job that I've done. At the moment I'm only use RGB images for geo ref othomosiac and DEM. Eventually I would like to explore the NIR.  
  
• 

  David March 20, 2013 at 5:28pm

  Hello everyone. I am glad to see there is so much interest in using UAS for agriculture. I am a very experienced user of Tetracam products and I have a business reselling their multispectral cameras along with some unique add-on that tag all the images automatically with position and attitude data. Please checkout our website for more information. We also co-host workshops with Tetracam about 4 times per year that walk attendees through the process of capturing images, verifying coverage, and creating color infrared orthomosaics along with NDVI plots. We have done studies and the Tetracam ADC Lite produces NDVI results very comparable to Landsat. I look forward to seeing this industry develop and hope we can help others get involved. www.fieldofviewllc.com
• 

  LanMark March 20, 2013 at 9:09am

  Right now the functionality that exists for consuming imagery from the modified MaxMax.com camera.  I am not experienced in the workflow and requirements above the image processing.. but definitely want to bake in as much functionality in a specialized tool that moves the adoption of UAVs in agriculture.
  
  Some of the GIS tools are just outside of the price range that a typical crop specialist can afford of a precision farmer... so hopefully I can figure out what these sorts of people need and work it in.  So yeah I would love as much data as you guys have and hear your stories on the inputs and outputs and how you go about producing the valuable data.
• 

  JP March 20, 2013 at 4:02am

  Hi LanMark: Nice work. We have tons of data if you need it. Does your program work on single images or large geo-referenced orthos? 

  http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/geo-referenced-tetra-cam-adc-mu...
• T3

  James March 20, 2013 at 3:24am

  LanMark Gongrats! youve done a very nice job. I have tons off indices and crop development models that i gradually translate to GIS rutines.  But i think its better to have a single and usefull app to make these calcs, like yours.

  if you want any data to test, send me a pm. I will be back after 29/3
• 

  LanMark March 19, 2013 at 3:42pm

  I am a software architect and developer.. the app below is not from MaxMax but my own creation to be able to handle the data that my MaxMax camera is outputting... I really hated using the ImageJ system which is really slow and the way the bracket the data provides bad results.. plus there are more algorithms for doing NDVI then just one.. I have 7 that I use right now.
  
  The KSU guys have hooked me up with some great data they have collected like a 700MB stitched file to use for development.. which right now takes 12 seconds to process the 314 million data points.
  
  I recently added the ability to select part of the image and get a statistical analysis of that area of the image using the algorithm which you can see here:

  

  It is quite the work in progress right now.. I recently also added multi-threading to vastly improve performance in analysis.
• T3

  James March 19, 2013 at 3:29pm

  Unbelievable!! LanMark, i was about to sent you pm, about your great app!! iam using MAXMAX cams both for my research and job, but i had never seen any app from max max like this..

  This is what iam working on
• 

  LanMark March 19, 2013 at 3:23pm

  I have been working with some great researchers at KSU on doing aerial vegetation stress analysis using modified cameras that capture the near infrared band.. I posted a couple pics of my processing system in my pics under my profile.  There are huge possibilities in just remote sensing in agriculture.. where the NDVI analysis could be huge.
  
  Here is an example of the sorts of data we are processing.. you can see where the crop was burned and how some of the vegetation is already starting to grow in here in March.

  Just the tip of the ice burg.   I am trying to find more people in this area of expertise to understand the needs, and how to fill those needs with commercial products and services.
  
  Currently they use satellites and piloted crafts to do this and its not very accurate.. especially the satellites that have to pierce through the entire atmosphere all of which results in less accurate data... not to mention they don't fly overhead all that often and are expensive to get data from... especially compared to your own UAV.

   
• 

  Troy Reabe March 19, 2013 at 2:01pm

  I think the field of avation needs alot of advancments before a drone can be able to start to replace crop dusters like the Thrush or AirTractor. There are helicopter drones but the have a very low coverage rate per hour. Also Helicopters are expensive to run per hour.

  For our spraying service during the high time of the year for us there is not enugh time in the day to do the work that needs to get done and we are able to do around 200 acres per hour with a plane provided we have a short ferry time. A helicopter like the Bell 47 can't even do half that.

  We are also carrying 500 Gallons a load. so this would be a big drone or you would need a nurce truck on sight.That has its own problems of a portable chemical containment system for mixing and loading the drone.