Chapter 17 - Professional drone mapping

Abstract

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs), also known as drones, have recently been applied in various domains of natural sciences and engineering. Most of these applications require geospatial information about the environment. Consequently, 3D mapping via UASs has become a matter of growing interest among both researchers and industries. Solutions developed for this purpose are usually equipped with various types of cameras and, more recently, with laser scanners as well. The focus of this chapter is on camera-based systems. The final output from these systems is often in the form of orthorectified mosaics, digital elevation models, and dense 3D point clouds. Advanced data analytics can be applied either to these final topographic products or to the raw images to extract further geospatial and thematic information. This chapter provides an overview of advanced photogrammetry techniques that are applied for unmanned aerial mapping. The first two sections of this chapter focus on the concepts of structure from motion and photogrammetric processing of multiview stereo images. Whether you are a professional developer or an end-user of unmanned aerial mapping solutions, knowing how your desired output is generated helps you define your workflow more effectively for either data collection or data processing. Nowadays, there exist many service providers in the areas of geospatial data collection with drones. Unfortunately, there is still no universal set of standards for the service providers to follow in their manner of evaluating and reporting the quality of their products. With this regard, the last section of this chapter provides users with the information needed to understand and interpret the quality of unmanned aerial photogrammetry systems.