I just wanted to share a mapping mission I ran last week with the E382 from Event 38 (my company) and processed with DroneMapper.com.
The reason these results are somewhat noteworthy is the amount of time it took to make this. I pulled up to the flying field, setup the plane in maybe 5 or 6 minutes. I hand launched the plane, flew around manually for exactly 5 minutes, taking 110 pictures in that time. Brought it in for a quick landing in some bushes then I packed up and went home. At home I uploaded the images straight to DroneMapper without even reviewing them. A few hours later, DM came back with really awesome results. All of this took just a few minutes of my time not counting the drive to and from the field.
My setup on the E382 is as follows:
- Skywalker 168cm Airframe
- APM 2.0 with ArduPlane 2.4
- 3DR Telemetry Radios 915MHz
- Canon Powershot SX230 HS with CHDK
The camera is really what made this so quick.. with built in GPS all the images are geotagged automatically as they're taken. This mission was actually done to see if it could keep a GPS lock for the entire flight which it did. Having the images geotagged and processing them with DroneMapper returns files that can be analyzed (as in the image above) for things like the elevation profile of any path, the length of a path, the area of a field and so on. There are nice tutorials on how to get started with that in the DroneMapper FAQ.
Measuring the length of a trail
Measuring the area of low lying vegetation
Extracting the coordinates of a point of interest
Comments
Richard, sometimes in that situation it helps to remove as many pictures as you can. With so many duplicates it looks like there must be at least a few pictures showing the same spot. It may also just be such a featureless landscape that there aren't many strong matching points to put pictures together so it can get confused more easily.
@Jeff - The issues I am having are to do with the stitching - If you look carefully at the road at the top - the paths onto the common are repeated. I am putting this down to the poor angle the photographs have been taken...
Yes I think continuous drive needs you to hold the shutter down. Some remotes may be able to do that but if you're using a remote you almost may as well tie it in with the autopilot. Also 1FPS is a little too high, I shoot about once ever 2.7 seconds flying about 12 m/s at 100-120m altitude and that gives a workable amount of overlap.
The D20 will be supported by CHDK http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/D20.. it's just a matter of how long the developers take to finish.
Seems fine, but it's always the same, it's better for mapping cameras with more megapixels
i havent tried it myself, but Canon has a new rugged point and shoot camera with GPS. Since its canon it might be able to use CHDK, http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/02/07/Canon_D20
http://pentax.ca/pdf/o_manuals/om_OPTIOWG2_e.pdf i think we need to hold trigger button for continuous shooting
Denis Deasy: good find this PENTAX ! http://www.dpreview.com/products/pentax/compacts/pentax_optiowg2gps
manual focus... continuous drive 1fps ? not shure if this can shoot for ever ? the remote control will allow many trigering gadget to work with ! THANKS
@Jeff Great work - I intend using Dronemapper for aerial photo processing, this confirms it as best current option. Was considering using APM to trigger camera at specific waypoints, but not sure if that command is currently implemented (I know the code is written...), so have been looking for a rugged camera (Irish conditions make that a necessity !), with high pixel count, decent lens, GPS and intervalometer...the Pentax Optio WG-2 GPS is the only one I could find that has that feature spec, maybe worth trying. The new Olympus TG-1 iHS looks pretty impressive, but I don't think it's got an intervalometer - I agree it's a mystery as to why most cameras don't have this feature, seems an obvious one to me.
Thanks! Yes, that's just from a shot which was improperly exposed. I haven't experimented much with any fixes but I've found that normal cameras have trouble taking pictures of water when the water makes up most of the frame. One thing I need to do in the future at least is to lock focus at infinity which I think will take care of some of the blurry pictures near the water's edge.
Very nice results, congrats!
In the middle of your mosaic, there is a spot which is brighter than the rest of the image. Do you know why that is?
How does dronemapper deal with color ballancing?
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