Abstract
Abstract. Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial System (UAS)-based photogrammetry offers an affordable, fast and effective approach to real-time acquisition of high resolution geospatial information and automatic 3D modelling of objects for numerous applications such as topography mapping, 3D city modelling, orthophoto generation, and cultural heritages preservation. In this paper, the capability of four different state-of-the-art software packages as 3DSurvey, Agisoft Photoscan, Pix4Dmapper Pro and SURE is examined to generate high density point cloud as well as a Digital Surface Model (DSM) over a historical site. The main steps of this study are including: image acquisition, point cloud generation, and accuracy assessment. The overlapping images are first captured using a quadcopter and next are processed by different software to generate point clouds and DSMs. In order to evaluate the accuracy and quality of point clouds and DSMs, both visual and geometric assessments are carry out and the comparison results are reported.
Highlights
Recent developments in the Unmanned Aerial System (UAS)-based data acquisition techniques and low cost aerial imaging sensors improve the speed of rapid 3D mapping in numerous civil, agriculture, military and archeology applications
The number of extracted key points per image for Pix4Dmapper Pro is higher while the number of final dense points for Agisoft Photoscan is higher than the other tools
The point spacing for point clouds of Agisoft Photoscan and Pix4Dmapper Pro is similar (0.016 m) and lower than point spacing for two other software
Summary
Recent developments in the UAS-based data acquisition techniques and low cost aerial imaging sensors improve the speed of rapid 3D mapping in numerous civil, agriculture, military and archeology applications. In order to process resulting several hundred high resolution overlapping images and automatic 3D reconstruction, different photogrammetry and computer vision algorithms have been developed based on dense image matching techniques. These algorithms first extract the corresponding features or points in the overlapping images and compute 3D information for each pixel. Based on the results of this assessment, the total number of generated points by Pix4D is higher than other software. Both Pix4D and Agisoft Photoscan software are employed to generate a 3D model of underwater objects with different spatial scales. The image alignment by Agisoft Photoscan is carried out better while
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
