Drones Could 3D-Map Scores of Hectares of Land In Just a Few Hours

sciencehabit writes: Unmanned drones aren't just for warfare. In recent years, they've been used to map wildlife and monitor crop growth. But current software can't always handle the vast volume of images they gather. Now, researchers have developed an algorithm that will allow drones to 3D-map scores of hectares of land in less than a day — an advance that is important for cost-effective farming, disaster relief, and surveillance operations.

Their computer program directly projects the points from each photo onto a 3D space without knowing the exact shape of the land or the camera positions. As a result, the tie points don't necessarily match up, which means the same corn plant can have two projections on the model. When that happens, the algorithm automatically takes the middle point between the two projections as the more accurate location and adjusts the camera position accordingly, one image at a time. Because the algorithm tweaks far fewer things at each step, the shortcut drastically speeds up calculations. Once the software has adjusted the camera positions for all the photos, the software repeats the entire process — starting from projecting the points to the 3D space — to correct for any errors.

Comments

Re:This isn't new.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually learn to read, you'll discover that the new thing here is a newer algorithm that's significantly faster than the current "standard".

FAA is not allowing Drone use in farming today

[Anonymous Coward]

Talking with a large farm owner over the weekend who is ready to start using Drones to cover about 5500 acres as a supplement to their current sat. imagery. They were told no by the FAA, which says they will not be able to accommodate farming drones until 2016 at the earliest.

So instead of figuring out how it's going to benefit the farmer and working through the leading edge adoption issues with farms who are motivated to give it a try, they are regulating them out of existence, before it can even get started.

I can certainly understand the need for regulations as problems arise, but to write the regulations before there is an issue is just a typical stupid gov response. The FAA will make the entire process more expensive, more cumbersome and more restrictive than it needs to be without any real world experiences upon which to regulate.

It would be simple to set a weight, height and radius limit for farming drone use. Could be done in just a couple of days with 2-3 smart people but that is just too easy for gov work.

Re:Farm topography

[RingDev]

It doesn't have to be highly accurate for agricultural use. More valuable is the soil samples. Nothing your average joe-farmer is going to spring for, but many of the mega-farms already do this to identify the minimal amount of fertilizer/herbicides to use to maintain a maximum profit margin.

I'm interested in this for another reason though. The state (assuming other states have similar programs) already has recording equipment attached to a truck that they drive every road with. When project requests come in, they can play back the video and do things like count the cracks per mile, look for shoulder erosion, count pot holes, etc... It is a manual process, literally a guy sits in front of a monitor and takes notes as he watches the road roll by.

To be able to take that video and run it through a system like this to get a point cloud, then work out a "smooth road" algorithm to identify deviations... we could take a guy out of the eye-glazing/brain killing job of watching road videos for hours each day to reviewing short segments of deviations, letting him spend more time on putting together proposal responses or proactively notifying municipalities/agencies when there are significant issues that need to be addressed.

-Rick