Remotely-piloted aerial system for photogrammetry: orthoimage generation for mapping applications

Abstract

Recently the tendency of replacing aircraft by light, simple, cheap unmanned aerial vehicles for the purposes of updating the field of aerial photogrammetry has been observed. The article deals with the issues of project calculations concerning unmanned aerial vehicles flights and an analysis of the images acquired during field-testing flights. In this article, we analyze the images acquired by mini unmanned aerial vehicles, in particular, the 1.8 plane and the plane SOA-1 that have been processed by a commercial off-the-shelf software package Agisoft PhotoScan (Russia). The 1.8 plane was equipped with the camera Canon S100, containing known camera calibration parameters. These parameters were used for the processing of the image. The aircraft SOA-1 had the camera Canon PowerShot SX280 HS without camera calibration parameters. The camera parameters were calculated by software during the processing image. The paper also presents results of an investigation into the average camera location errors during the test flights, the quality of orthoimage generation by point cloud and a digital terrain model.