Comparison of UAV images processing softwares

Abstract

Recently, the aircrafts tend to be replaced by unmanned, light, simple, aerial vehicles (UAVs), same can be said about the field of aerial photogrammetry. UAV system besides the standard airframe and engine includes main processor board, Inertial Navigation System (INS), Global Positions Systems (GPS), telemetry module. For areal imaging purposes there can be a photo camera mounted too. The images taken by the areal camera can later be processed by software which is specialized for photogrammetry. The project of testing Pix4d Mapper (Switzerland) and PhotoMod (Russia) software programs is described in this paper. Pix4d Mapper is software specialized for UAV images proceedings meanwhile PhotoMod is designed for common photogrammetry proceedings. PhotoMod request some special photogrammetric knowledge from the user. There were 36 images processed producing ortho-mosaic and surface model. The results are further described in the paper.