Recently Lianpin Koh suggest to me to try out the Microsoft ICE. It is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. The best part : It's a freeware.
Being just completed to map 20000 Ha of oil palm land for a local plantation, I have huge data set on hand to try out if it is suitable for general use. This is a pure images stitching program, so the end result is not geo reference.
The result is simply amazing. I just load all the images and wait for the program to finish the work. No editing or intervention what so ever. Depends on the number of images, my i5 8GB ram notebook take 15 to 20 minutes to finish a 350 images data set. I'm very impress with the stitching quality, the final image looks like it was taken by a single shot.
I do encounter some problem with area cover by thick tropical rain forest. MS ICE had difficulty to stitch those images and most of the time it just ignore it and leaving the area empty. I think this is a common problem for all UAV base photogrammetry program.
The total area of this mission is about 250 Ha. The above image show smaller area because I have crop it. My Skywalker base UAV take about 30 minutes to cover the whole mission at 300 M altitude. The ground sampling distance is about 11 cm per pixel.
For those of you who just need an aerial photo of a big area, I think MC ICE can do a good job especially if the images contain many features. APM and Mission Planner is a real winning combination for aerial mapping. The system is robust and reliable. Give it a try, I'm sure you'll not disappointed.
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Hi Grant, ICE is just a stitching program. For geo ref orthomosaic, DEM or DSM, you'll need program like pix4d to do the job.
Hi Wieliang, It take three weeks for us to map the whole area. Each mission flight cover 200 to 300 Ha depends on location. As you may know, landing area is very limited in plantation.
No the stitch is not good enough, the very nature of stitches is that stuff gets sacrificed and things stretched.
So would it be possible to simply georeferenced this image using control points (known reference locations) with a program like global mapper? Or is the image stitching not good enough in ICE to do this? Obviously this wouldn't give elevation data but a good accurate 2D georeferenced photo is what I"m looking for. Also would it be possible to use google earth to provide those control points?
How long did you take to map 20,000 Ha?
The next step is to put it into photosynth and create a point cloud. Microsoft seem to have left photosynth and ICE alone for a while now there are other exciting things in the wings.
This is the point where everything has become cheap, the airframes, autopilots and cameras not quite mass adoption will start happening its just too simple to do.
wow. just tried the MS ICE software. it is actually pretty amazing...!
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