Another interesting week on DroneLab

Just a quick post to highlight the range of datasets that people have been uploading to the platform this week. It's not just drones that generate very large image files! 

First, this old aerial photo from Dunkirk was shared on Facebook earlier in the week. The dataset has been created from a series of images obtained from the IGN (Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière) 

 In this project, images were obtained from an aerial campaign carried out in 1949 on the city of Dunkirk, in northern France (171 shots), which allowed the creation of an area covering 4900 hectares at a resolution of 11 cm. 

 "A delicate and imperfect exercise (in) some areas but the result remains very satisfying for applications of cadastre or archaeology". 

  

Here's a link to the original article which contains a link to the project on the DroneLab website...

https://www.dronesimaging.com/realisation-dune-orthophoto-de-la-ville-de-dunkerque-a-partir-danciennes-images-argentiques-captees-en-1949/

Demonstration of embed code to show how an interactive map can be displayed as part of a webpage on another site.



Map data collected by UK Drone Surveys using a Small Unmanned Aerial System from Quest UAV.

National Churches Trust

Drone Photography

So, this afternoon I've mainly been messing around with drone photography, but not in the usual sense. This is actual photography, of physical drones. This has been quite interesting. Here's a test image, which was just something that has been sat on my desk, but this should give you the general idea...

...and another one.

In the next couple of days we should see our first drone acquired orthomosaic from India. Nice to see that drone technology is being adopted on the subcontinent with both hardware and software being developed using locally, rather than just buying in an off-the-shelf UAV system. We've recently seen drone data from Papua New Guinea on the site, too. Perhaps it's time to build a drone projects map using anonymised location data from the database - that would look pretty neat!

Very minor site news post, nothing major, mainly for my own benefit.

New sign up last night from Argentina.

I need to add an option to the sign up page that lets a new user choose their country from a dropdown list. Primarily, I need this for reporting so that I can get an understanding of where new users are coming from, but secondarily, I should be able to use this data to provide a localised service where the demand exists.

We now have operators in Portugal, France, Spain, Poland, Romania, Latvia, South Korea, Jamaica, Canada and the United States.

Pix4D - Drone Mapping Software

We often get asked about our workflow here, and, due to the nature of the industry, we also tend to field quite a few questions from new operators who are getting into the business. Nine times out of ten we're asked about processing software and what we'd recommend. For people who are getting into drone operations I'm most likely to recommend Pix4D. Agisoft's Photoscan is another great product, but the learning curve is steeper and (to me) it's not as intuitive.