Bearing in mind, in the UK, we can only ascend to 120m Max. If the whole desired area cannot be captured in one photo, should you move the drone to the next capture area, or angle the camera from the same position?
I have tried moving the drone, but can’t get images to line up (stitch).
Also what what program (free program) do you recommend to stitch images?
I’d like to capture a large area, of mainly roads and office buildings, to use as a map, any help would be most appreciated
Moving the drone laterally and angling will give you different results and probably require different solutions for stitching.
Staying in one place and taking a bunch of photos by panning left, right, up and down will give you a panorama like Wayne’s above.
I’ve used Microsoft ICE (free if you can find it and are on Windows) for stitching images like this and it does quite a good job.
If you’re wanting to do mapping, then top-down, vertical scanning is probably the way to go and I believe there are different programs for dealing with that sort of thing but I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head what they are.
If you’re having trouble lining up the images have you tried switching the gridlines on? Overlap all the images by a third and microsoft ICE should be able to stitch them together. I normally use ptgui to stictch (not free) but I had some panos that it really struggled with. I decided to give ICE a go before having to add the manual control points. It managed on the problem panos no problem.
I know there’s been a discussion on here about this. I did a quick search but it didn’t instantly leap under my nose.
I did find this, though, from only a few days ago.
There’s some software mentioned, and it also reiterates that Litchi isn’t available on the Mini 3 yet, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t take the pictures manually I suppose.
Do you want panoramas (like the one above) or orthophotos (like the one below, that one has been downscaled the original image is 14,000 x 13,000 pixels, each pixel being 2 cm)?
For panoramas, use the inbuilt mode but turn on save original images so you can choose to make the pano in photoshop instead.
For orthophotos, fly a regular survey grid then I’d recommend WebODM to make the orthophoto (will also do 3d reconstructions), takes a chunk of computer power and has a bit of a learning curve but produces good results, you can turn off all the 3d stuff and just output an orthophoto if you want to save some time.
WebODM is free (non commerical) if you compile it (dead easy on Linux, a bit harder on Windows) or about £45 for an installer, a relatively easy shortcut is to run it on AWS which on a spot instance will cost you £2-3 per dataset if you dont have a PC to run it on. I own an installer, but have recently switched to having an extra SSD in my PC running linux which I can compile it on a lot easier.
As you can see in my example, you will get some artifacts if there are moving subjects, just to be aware of.
<3h for well optimised 42MP GPS tagged images using matcher neighbours (Ryzen 3900x, 32GB ram, RTX2070S) can be much faster (1h) if the images are small enough to fit in the GPU vram
Thanks. Just tried installing with the shell script on Windows. Unfortunately it’s very buggy so might have to spin up a Linux VM to get it working. Pretty cheeky to charge for a proper installer…
Price for convinience, the code is open source so you can compile your own windows binary if you want to. I paid for it, was worth it for me even though I run a lot of my processing on a Linux cluster now (which is a very easy install in docker)
Personally think it’s a decent way to support open source stuff, and it’s not uncommon, delft3D takes the same approach for example.
The basic self install for windows needs docker, which is a VM in its own right, make sure that’s all set up correctly if you’re having issues, no point running a VM in a VM
