How to create a large aerial photo mosaic?

lobo1725 · Jul 27, 2021

I’m planning to create a mosaic of possibly 50 aerial photos of a farm (approx. 4km x 0.5km) with a M2P. I’m in a location where it is legal to fly to 500m. I’m thinking of creating a series of waypoints and taking a DNG or TIFF at each then stitch them together with Photoshop. The other alternative I thought of was to do the same run but take video, then using Premier Pro extract stills at various points and again stitch them together. With the latter idea, I suspect the definition will be lousy. Has anyone done this using the M2P? Does anyone have advice please?

Meta4 · Jul 27, 2021

lobo1725 said:
I’m planning to create a mosaic of possibly 50 aerial photos of a farm (approx. 4km x 0.5km) with a M2P. I’m in a location where it is legal to fly to 500m. I’m thinking of creating a series of waypoints and taking a DNG or TIFF at each then stitch them together with Photoshop. The other alternative I thought of was to do the same run but take video, then using Premier Pro extract stills at various points and again stitch them together. With the latter idea, I suspect the definition will be lousy. Has anyone done this using the M2P? Does anyone have advice please?

If you are you wanting to create a map-like image, the way to do that is with one of the mapping apps like DroneDeploy to plan and fly the mission.
For nearly 500 acres, you'll need a lot more than 50 images and require several flights.
For something that big, you'll need specialised software to do the stitching and forget using dng images as they aren't necessary at all and would just make it harder.

Here's one I made of a 120 acre site.
That required 380 images (using big overlaps).
The full image is huge 32000 x 24000 pixels with very high detail and can be read in Google Earth to use their measuring tools.

lobo1725 · Jul 27, 2021

That’s awesome! That’s precisely what I want to create. Thanks so much for your advice Meta4. I suspected that might be the case…. I don’t need the ability to manipulate in DNG format and I’ve already tried and ditched HDR! I’ve also already done some 500m runs over the area and can calculate the coverage with each image from that. I was going to work on 30% overlap…. do you think that’s sufficient? I’ll chase down the software too.

Meta4 · Jul 27, 2021

lobo1725 said:
That’s awesome! That’s precisely what I want to create. Thanks so much for your advice Meta4. I suspected that might be the case…. I don’t need the ability to manipulate in DNG format and I’ve already tried and ditched HDR! I’ve also already done some 500m runs over the area and can calculate the coverage with each image from that. I was going to work on 30% overlap…. do you think that’s sufficient? I’ll chase down the software too.

I do it to create accurate orthophoto mosaics and that requires big overlaps (>70% and even more in forested areas)
It's not possible to do that with manual flying and the app makes it simple. to achieve.
Here's a screenshot showing the centres of each image from a run of images shot for a small project.