Dear all, I would like to find out good camera/drone settings to create ortho-photo-mosaic pictures (stitched) at night. Tested few times and getting mostly unusable and blurry pictures due to fact that drone does not stop long enough to take properly exposured pictures. Does anybody have experience of this and what are such settings that Mavic flying a mapping route get good pictures at night while flying?
ortho-photo-mosaic pictures at night
- Thread starter Jimjoyhill
- Start date
It's not a case of finding the right settings.
At night you just won't be able to get good enough images for mapping, no matter how long the drone stops.
You need good lighting to be able to shoot suitable images for mapping.
Wait for the sun to come back up and try mapping during the day.
Last edited:
Ralph thompson
Well-Known Member
You first have to find who is going to stitch all your images into an orthographic projection. They will recommend the settings to use (best altitude, overlap, etc). But night is going to be challenging, why do you have to do it at night? You get very little if any detail in the terrain, it’s going to be noisy with a very high ISO and the orthographic projection will be a lot of black.
Hi, thank you for your comments. I have a case where we have large green-field factory and construction site where I have created day-time ortho pictures successfully and the question came from the customer that they would like to see have how well they have succeed with the lighting arrangements within the site i.e they expected to have ortho-type of picture to show well illuminated areas and those that need improvement.
...so it is not so important to have noisy or no-details type of ortho but more like functional summary of the situation. Even this level has been challenging for me because the pictures are "moving" and not possible to stitch.
Ralph thompson
Well-Known Member
I suggest the following;
- don't do it at night, do it in mid Civil Twilight (approx. 15 mins after sunset on a clear night so u get some shadows). If the lights are automatic they'll be on by this time
- use manual camera settings and make sure you have sufficient exposure to capture texture in the terrain and takeoff right after making these settings (it gets dark quickly). Stitching programme won't be able to find sufficient points to connect the images without detail & texture.
- you have to find the company that will stitch the map, Dronelink (expensive but the best), MapsMadeEasy (free for basic, but doesn't do 3D obliques or IR), OpenDroneMap (WebODM if your good at software) and many others. But they each have recommendations & requirements which don't necessarily overlap, eg they don't all accept RAW (DNG) although jpegs are more than good enough for most purposes.
Most stitching programmes provide guides on how to best accomplice good map & orthomosaiics
- don't do it at night, do it in mid Civil Twilight (approx. 15 mins after sunset on a clear night so u get some shadows). If the lights are automatic they'll be on by this time
- use manual camera settings and make sure you have sufficient exposure to capture texture in the terrain and takeoff right after making these settings (it gets dark quickly). Stitching programme won't be able to find sufficient points to connect the images without detail & texture.
- you have to find the company that will stitch the map, Dronelink (expensive but the best), MapsMadeEasy (free for basic, but doesn't do 3D obliques or IR), OpenDroneMap (WebODM if your good at software) and many others. But they each have recommendations & requirements which don't necessarily overlap, eg they don't all accept RAW (DNG) although jpegs are more than good enough for most purposes.
Most stitching programmes provide guides on how to best accomplice good map & orthomosaiics
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