Hello fellow UAVers,
dronemapper.com
My UAV partner (Ross) and I have been working on a project that we'd love to get some feedback and additional ideas for. Our intention is to allow free access to this web based tool and also a really cheap subscription model per month (think $4 range) to support hosting costs and the large amount of cpu processing power needed to generate maps. The free users will get all the same features but lower resolution imagery and possibly less accurate georeferenced tiles/tiffs/added watermarks to support the site. No ads.
Our software and backend servers use tons of different open source packages to complete the process of georeferencing and building image mosaics. We are also trying to offer an "easy to use" UI to view each flight and all the associated data. We really hope you enjoy our ideas! We are planning to open the site up to beta users by request in a month or so. Please keep an eye out for more information on that.
We've been having some problems getting our own flight systems up and running, ranging from a bad MUX on an APM 1 (thanks for fixing!), APM2 delays, and code issues with the Tri-Copter platform. This has prevented us from getting amazing imagery on our own at this point. :( Lucky, the awesome guys at Petryx UAV posted a ton of sample imagery which is so cool! Pteryx FTP Sample Imagery
We can't wait to open the site to beta users so you can test your own imagery and flight paths, hopefully at that point we will have our own platform up and running!
So, here we go -- some screenshots and comments:
Upload your flight imagery and Ardulog/GPX/Petryx/CSV log file.
Imagery and Flight Processing Queue
Imagery Dashboard w/ Flight Path, GeoTIFF served via Geoserver, Blended and Georeferenced Mosaics
Same as above, different flight.
Georeferenced View w/ Google Earth API - Shows Tiles, Flight Path
Second Part of Georefenced View - Shows GeoTiff Mosaic Preview and Metadata
Third Part of Georeferenced View - Shows Additional Maps
Blended Mosaic
Our Tricopter platform. Quadcopter and also Skywalker platforms we've been testing!
Quadcopter w/ IR Powershot a490 Camera
We would love to hear some questions and comments!
Thanks for reading and thanks for your support,
DM Team (JP and Ross)
Comments
Bravo....what a great project..i am just a beginer in this but i am willing to learn... maybe something from this video helps(but i am sure you already saw it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byF9AxlXhRM&feature=related
Ross, you are saying you are calculating the absolute position and orientation of the result by use of GPS? The accuracy will then be limited by GPS and IMU quality, so I guess would be correct to about some meters, at best... The placement of the gps related to the camera will not have a significant influence, especially in planes, where the movement will make the position even harder to estimate... If you want to have good georeferencing you will probably have to provide some reference points in the pictures.
@Irvin Stafford aka The Old Flyer
Hi Irvin, thanks for the link. Awesome work btw! I actually read that a few days ago and sent it to Ross (he is the hardware guy and working on our flight platforms). Sorry I was too busy to respond. We just started building a Skywalker platform and your post is a really good reference. :)
DM can build mosaics from GPS EXIF information but the problem here is most cameras don't have compass heading so it is impossible to get the orientation of the photo. We found a way to hack around this by writing a small php script which will try and calculate the heading of the UAV from GPS waypoint A and GPS waypoint B.
Additionally, the camera gives us the above sea level elevation which is not ideal. We wrote a script to query the USGS digital elevation service for the GPS waypoint to calculate the above ground elevation and feed this into the database. The APM or Petryx logs seem to be the best option for most accuracy at this point and takes care of most of this.
So the service would produce the same map with or without GPS EXIF but the accuracy would suffer.
The stitching happens two ways, one uses OpenCV and a bunch of control points to automate the building of the mosaic. So, the service can build mosaics on the fly with or without any GPS information using this method.
The second idea uses gdal tools to build the mosaic, which is georeferenced. This is feed into Geoserver automagicly using the rest api and displayed via WMS. Hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions!
We would love to get some help with testing and development, thank you! There will be a beta soon and beta users get a free account for life. Thx JP
JP
Your service seems to be exactly what we need.
See my post: http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/a-successful-apm-aerial-survey-mi...
We have 124 photos taken with a Canon SD1100 from 100 Meters, flown in an APM equipped Kadett.
The mosaic was stitched with PTGui. After a lot of hand intervention the results were very good.
Georeferencing was not a requirement for this mission.
Our next attempts at aerial surveying will be with the Canon S100 camera that will give us EXIF GPS data on the photos. Georeferencing will be a requirement in the future.
Could your service process our GPS EXIF data and APM Log files to produce the position of each photo on a Google map of the area?
Could your service produce the same map from AMP Log files and EXIF data without GPS?
Will your service stitch the photos into Panoramic mosaics?
Is there any way we can help with your development efforts?
We can supply photos, APM .log, .tlog, .gpx, and .kml or .kmz files from our aerial survey mission.
Thank you in advance for your efforts.
@James -- Ross and I have been talking about a reports function with some information like this. It hasn't been coded yet, but should be pretty straight forward. Also, an embedded option to post your maps/flight on your blog/forum site would be cool. Matching a mosaic against a set of georeferenced control imagery via WMS is what we are working on next, which would yield some good results for a report and contain accuracy information. Right now, the GeoTIFF files that are built are as accurate as the onboard sensors like Ross said. :) Thanks JP
@Arthur.benemann Sure, we've got a bunch of php scripts on the backend which process the imagery after it is inserted into the database. The php scripts match the flightlog data/gps location/camera direction/elevation with the timestamp of the images, building kml and other datasets. It also can use the EXIF GPS data of the images but this is often even less accurate vs. APM/flight controller logs. Thx
James...In regards to accuracy we will be able to give an estimate soon. But it depends a lot on where the GPS Sensor is mounted in relation to the camera. On the tri we are flying...the sensor is about 2 inches away from the camera. So that throws things off a little. I am pretty sure the interface lets the user tweak these settings to get more and more accurate.
Thanks for checking it out.
Can you share the way the photos and the APM log are sync?
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.
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!!!
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