Welcome to the Time Trust Trial contest, Round 4 (T3-4)! This round is an aerial imaging task. Here is your assignment:
Program your UAV to take photos from an altitude of ~400 feet that you then stitch together to make a single image showing an area of 500mx500m (a quarter square kilometer). Somewhere in that image, a Santa (or replica of a Santa, poster of a Santa, just you wearing a Santa hat, etc) must be seen. NO PHOTOSHOP (ie, the sample above would be disqualified)--you actually need to bring something Santa-ish to the field so your UAV can capture it in its shots (yes, I know it will be very small. Just circle the location in your image so we can enlarge and inspect--don't make us do "Where's Wally"!) This is to prove that the shots aren't actually taken from Google Earth ;-)
You can use any path strategy you want: "lawnmower", spiral, concentric circles, etc...
For stitching software, I use the free PTGui, but you're welcome to use whatever software you prefer.
And for your camera, may I suggest you hack up some cool way to trigger the shutter with our cool ServoSwitch?
KML tracks must be provided. Video is not required, but is suggested.
We've now switched to a six-week cycle, so the deadline is 12:00 midnight PST on Sunday, January 17, 2010 now Monday, January 18th due to the Martin Luther King holiday in the US.
The overall winner will be the best quality image, as decided by the judges (based on a combination of resolution, stitch quality and overall coolness--a clever Santa will win you brownie points, and a pretty area is no bad thing [note: snow is lovely, but be warned that it can confuse stitching software]), but everyone who completes the challenge will win a prize.
Enjoy!
I had a chance last week to fly a couple of patterns and go something usable on the 3rd try. A simple path that only took pictures going into the wind to make the spacing consistent. I used Atto V1.8 with a Canon A590 8meg camera I got off craigslist for $50. I'm amazed how well it stitch together all by itself in Microsoft ICE. The wind was out of the south so it was crabbing a lot to the right. Not sure if thats the reason for the slight curver to the picture.
Taking the pictures was easier than figuring out how to display 120 8meg pictures. I tried PTGui without much luck but ICE stitched it up and I uploaded a Deep Zoom group to my web site.
Well, the weather moved out this morning so I decided to give it a go and take some pictures. There was still some wind that was making the cross track code work a little harder than it did on my last run two days ago.
Many of the images came out a little blurry. There are several things I'm going to do to improve that on the next run but if I can't get it done in time here is my entry. I used the Microsoft ICE program in auto mode to generate the stitch. Overall not a bad job for auto mode, but there are a few miss-alignments. I plan on using Hugin to generate lens correction parameters and will hand enter the alignment points, but I wanted to wait until I had some cleaner images before taking the extra time.
Brian
Close up with Santa. You can see the blur I'm referring to.
Hi everybody,
brakar was flying in interesting GPS conditions, hence the seriously-ill navigation periods. The whole situation is being analyzed, he has flown around 40min BEFORE the predicted official LOW-SAT window.
As EasyUAV was naturally losing additional satellites from view during turns, the GPS was lost completely for less than 1s several times in that flight. The plane was flying then on pure inertials (enabling in deep turn thus involving large course error before it levelled), but the dropout was too brief to cause automatic mission abort and this is why we can see those photos at all.
My old AXN Floater airframe was getting pretty beat up and I was having some radio problems so I decided to build up a fresh floater and install a 2.4 GHz radio system. here is a test run that was supposed to also include images, but when I got out to the field I realized I had the wrong firmware loaded (no trigger function). So this was a test run of a new airframe, new radio and new cross track code. Overall things went pretty well. We have some weather moving in, but I hope t get out in the next day or two and repeat the run with the camera on board.
This is my preliminary entry using EasyUAV:
the battery died too fast and the plane automatically returned home (miscalculated battery state, making too many flight pattern tests earlier, without the camera).
Used Microsoft ICE without effort as the photos were almost perfectly aligned. CropScan.kmz
This post is scanning only half of the surface and there is no Santa Claus around, so formally insufficient but IMO worth sharing. Made Dec 27th last year, just after the snow has melted.
By second thought, here is the whole stitch, don't know if I will have time to finish it due to work/travel activities. There was not anything in the rules saying it should be linked to GE I think
I could not help myself for making one more attempt. About the same track as last time, but take-off was on the far side. This time I had no problems with the zoom and got 153 beautiful picktures - wich stitched quite well in PTGui, (no need for adding extra control points). Just a few distortions and missing areas in the finished stitch. I did also try the MS ICE freeware (thanks for hint Gary) for stitching. Stitched very easily, but output-file was 550MB TIFF, which I don't have software to reduce.
Here is a reduced PTGui panorama. The original file is close to 28MB, so I will wait with uploading until see if I can make a geo-referenced to GoogleEarth.
Comments
www.kiss-sys.com You'll need to have Silverlight 2 installed
to see the Deep Zoom
I had a chance last week to fly a couple of patterns and go something usable on the 3rd try. A simple path that only took pictures going into the wind to make the spacing consistent. I used Atto V1.8 with a Canon A590 8meg camera I got off craigslist for $50. I'm amazed how well it stitch together all by itself in Microsoft ICE. The wind was out of the south so it was crabbing a lot to the right. Not sure if thats the reason for the slight curver to the picture.Taking the pictures was easier than figuring out how to display 120 8meg pictures. I tried PTGui without much luck but ICE stitched it up and I uploaded a Deep Zoom group to my web site.
PhotoMission3.kmlIt was fun to do, I could do swimming pool inspections for the city and get rich.
Kisssys
Many of the images came out a little blurry. There are several things I'm going to do to improve that on the next run but if I can't get it done in time here is my entry. I used the Microsoft ICE program in auto mode to generate the stitch. Overall not a bad job for auto mode, but there are a few miss-alignments. I plan on using Hugin to generate lens correction parameters and will hand enter the alignment points, but I wanted to wait until I had some cleaner images before taking the extra time.
Brian
Close up with Santa. You can see the blur I'm referring to.
KML File: T3_4.kml
Little Higher Res Cropped Image(1.5MB): ICE_stitch_1 Cropped.jpg
Aircraft/Autopilot: AXN Floater with PicPilot
Camera: Canon SD780 with CHDK Firmware mod.
Lens Setting: 33mm equiv.
Pictures Takes: 50
Take-off/Landing: Manual
Stitching Software: Microsoft ICE
Temperature: 42F
Wind: SSW variable gusts to 8mph
Flight time: 461 sec.
Average Speed: 28 Knots
brakar was flying in interesting GPS conditions, hence the seriously-ill navigation periods. The whole situation is being analyzed, he has flown around 40min BEFORE the predicted official LOW-SAT window.
As EasyUAV was naturally losing additional satellites from view during turns, the GPS was lost completely for less than 1s several times in that flight. The plane was flying then on pure inertials (enabling in deep turn thus involving large course error before it levelled), but the dropout was too brief to cause automatic mission abort and this is why we can see those photos at all.
See
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=14059833&postcount=2
T3-4 Test1.kml KML File
Brian
the battery died too fast and the plane automatically returned home (miscalculated battery state, making too many flight pattern tests earlier, without the camera).
Used Microsoft ICE without effort as the photos were almost perfectly aligned.
CropScan.kmz
This post is scanning only half of the surface and there is no Santa Claus around, so formally insufficient but IMO worth sharing. Made Dec 27th last year, just after the snow has melted.
And kmz-file for geo-ref. in GoogleEarth, (big thanks to Krzysztof): AskerMap.kmz
WARNING: 28MB
KML: trace.txt.trace001.kml
Here is a reduced PTGui panorama. The original file is close to 28MB, so I will wait with uploading until see if I can make a geo-referenced to GoogleEarth.
Reduced quality is always costly ;-)
-
4
-
5
-
6
-
7
-
8
of 12 Next