Thoughts for the afternoon,
I have recently attended the TSPS convention and Tech EXPO. Trimble seemed to have a crowd around their new UAV platform that claims to be able to gather DEM of 5cm accuracy. WOW. The FAA is expressing great concern about safety Liability and privacy concerning UAV's. As a Private Piilot myself, I would hate to run into a UAV that was not registered or had a not filed flight plan. I know that our field crews have forgotten things way too many times when heading out to the field, suchas datacollectors, files, hammers, rodmen, etc. I would not trust them to file a flight plan just to get a quick job done. I think that a certification program needs to be looked at to operate UAV's. On the other hand I would love to get my hands on one!
I got to thinking about ways to take photos from the ground level while the camera is attached to the range pole and getting a RTK shot on the PNEZ of the camera position. Yesterday I was thinking about it while surveying at a construction site.
How can I produce a DEM from the combination of a 20mp point and shoot Nikon mounted on my RTK rover setup?
I am always trying to figure out how to do things in the DIY mode. I took a total of 4 shots with the camera at about 20 different points around a pile of dirt. I spent the evening and most of this morning trying out different softwares that could be downloaded for free. I got some results from VisualSFM that look promising but I am still workiing on the process and steps to make anything look like a usable point cloud yet. PLUS, this is a huge learning curve!
I am wondering if there are any others who have wondered ablut getting Volumes from ground based photogrammetry methods. I would think if such a method could be devised, then it might be a good check and confirmation of the accuracies of volume measurement from RTK or/and Totalstation or/and scanning methods.
There seems to be a way "in Theory" to import raster images and scale to known points and certian angles and draw the breaklines. Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler seems to be the best option but there is not very many tutorials that I can follow to achieve the goal.
Any Thoughts From the forum?
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