Image Documentation of parking lot and road

[TNielsen]

Hi

Does anyone have experience in making image Documentation of an area by flying with camera pointing down and taking pictures, then collecting them in a big picture with software.

I would like to document a private road and parking lot before we are going to make a major rebuild. This to see what damage may occur on the road and parking lot when the big machines have been there.

Is it maybe possible to do with autopilot, or another automated way??

(I have a Mavic Air)

 

[Meta4]

Does anyone have experience in making image Documentation of an area by flying with camera pointing down and taking pictures, then collecting them in a big picture with software.

It sounds like you are asking about creating an orthophoto.
That's a standard mapping exercise.
Here's one of a 33 acre construction site.
It's made from 300 individual images with large overlaps and the actual image is very big (27000 x 24000 pixels)

Here's a little detail from it

 

[FoxhallGH]

What software app are you using to stitch that lot together?

 

[Meta4]

What software app are you using to stitch that lot together?

Agisoft

 

[AMann]

Try www.mapsmadeeasy.com, they have a good free trial offer that should make the exact map you need.

It is free for small mapping jobs, else you just pay per map size and it makes really good 3D and orthophoto maps easily for beginners.

Also check out Drone Deploy, have not used it myself, but they have a 14-day free trial giving you free tools and orthophoto map making. But its “only” $129/month after that :0

Also, there’s Agisoft’s Photoscan. It has a 30 free day trial, but its a $3500 professional level GIS tool that takes a long learning curve to use. Theres a good basic version of it for $150, I use that one for making 3d images mostly.

 

[Recycler]

Drone Deploy's 14 day free trial is for their bells and whistles commercial/industrial tools. There is permanent free access to the simpler tools for producing these sorts of 2D plan photographs and for topographical 3D models. Might be worth your consideration; it seems to work well.

 

[DanMan32]

Would those work with Air though?

 

[Recycler]

Air is supported on Drone Deploy. Sorry, don't know about the others.

 

[AMann]

Any of those mentioned above work with any jpg and most raw format photos downloaded from any type of camera, if you are looking for a program to control your drone and to automatically trigger the camera to take photos for you, its a different question entirely. Drone Deploy can do both, most of the others don’t.

 

[53-63-6f-74-74]

I'd recommend Pix4d Capture for collecting the photos. I've been using it in a professional capacity for almost a year. However, the trial period for their cloud processing will probably not be long enough for your project. You can still use the app to collect photos for as long as you wish, though, and use any other cloud processing service. There are plenty of apps that collect overlapping photos in a grid pattern. Precision Flight, DroneDeploy, Altizure, Maply, DroneHarmony, SkyDrones, etc. Some support the MA, some may not. Mapsmadeeasy.com may be another option for cloud processing; They will process small numbers of photos for free but in lesser resolution than you might need. I think DroneDeply still has a similar free option as well. I use Agisoft Photoscan to process photos collected with Pix4d capture. As an aside I'll mention that what you doing constitutes commercial UAV use, so depending on where you live you might require a 107 certification or an equivalent.

 

[bushie]

I use Drone Harmony to take the photos. It has a free trial available
You can then use Precission Mapper to create the orthomap. They have 5 maps creation for free. Finally I import the orthomap into MapWindow5 (again free) to plot the map, add text and print the final result.

All 3 have some learning curve but it is not too onerous.

 

[TNielsen]

Thanks a lot for input.

I think i is a to big job for me, and I have done then documentation a simple way instead.

I have just made waypoint as a grid in Autopilot, and then taken picture for every 5 second. These picture is then the documentation.

Again thanks a lot for the help.

 

[Meta4]

I think i is a to big job for me, and I have done then documentation a simple way instead.
I have just made waypoint as a grid in Autopilot, and then taken picture for every 5 second. These picture is then the documentation.

You can lead a horse to water .....
What you've done sounds harder than the alternatives and gives a less satisfactory result.

If you just used DroneDeploy, it calculates the flight, allows you to adjust overlaps etc and flies for you as well as capturing images with a precise overlap rather than a very hit-or-miss photo every 5 seconds.
And it does that for FREE.
What you choose to do with the resulting images is up to you