Drones Could 3D-Map Scores of Hectares of Land In Just a Few Hours 94
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.
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.
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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".
Re:This isn't new. (Score:4, Informative)
TFA states that the old algorithm breaks down once the number of source images exceeds a few hundred, at which point it can take thousands of hours to process. The new algorithm can accommodate over a thousand images and process them all in about four hours.
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How many Libraries of Congress is that?
-Rick
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Still wrong. 50 acres is about 0.2 square kilometers.
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I don't see your problem. Hectares are a fairly common unit for measuring land areas, essentially it's the SI analogue to the acre - a unit of area that's readily applicable to most land-working uses, without introducing clunky customary-unit conversion factors. At 10,000 times smaller, measurements in square meters have far too many trailing zeros to be convenient, and at 100x larger you'll usually be dealing with small fractions of square kilometers. And at 4046.86 square meters, do you really expect a
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40 rods to the hogshead.
units (Score:2)
what does it mean scores of hectares? [checks google]
For the 'mericuns, one score hectare is 49 acres. for the people who insist on SK/mks, one score hectare is 200,000 m^2. For the left-brain thinkers, there are 17 score hectares in Central Park in NYC or 64 football fields in one score hectare.
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More relevant units for those unaccustomed to SI: One hectare = 2.4711 acres (international presumably, there are a number of slightly different definitions of acre)
"Score" meanwhile seems to have largely lost it's historical specificity of 1 score = 20, or at least I've only ever heard modern usage in the indeterminate plural, wherein "scores" is a quantity larger than "dozens" but smaller than "hundreds"
LOL ... Scores of Hectares? (Score:5, Funny)
Scores of Hectares? Really guys?
Why, with our revolutionary fly-a-micating devices, which are capable of travelling at dozens of furlongs per fortnight, we will be able to monitor the Aether, and map the location of the peasants houses to within a few rods, thus ensuring we can maximize tithing.
A spokesman for the government was overcome with the vapors at the excitement of it all, and needed to be leeched lest her spleen overtake the rest of her humors and leave her dyspeptic and the evil spirits sway her from her normal temperament.
Off the record, a spokesman was hopeful that the new phrenology module would be available in version III.V, and evil people will be easily spotted from the air, and can then be rounded up for burning at the stake.
Goode Frye was optimistic this would remove the threat of the witches which have been stealing the souls of babies.
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Hey that's not fair. Hectares are a totally valid unit, for any time you want to describe a largish quantity of land without having to worry about most poeple knowing how much exactly you're talking about, and maybe realizing you're overbilling them.
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LOL, no, I do realize it's a valid unit of measure ... but when you start having "scores of hectares" it rapidly devolves into one of those "I have no idea of what this unit of measure is supposed to be telling me".
I suspect the majority of people haven't the slightest idea of what a hectare actually is -- I know I don't. It's some multiple of an acre, but not an integer multiple, because that would be complicated.
And then I'm sure you need some non-integer multiple of hectares to become the next meaningle
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It's a metric-derived unit, so expect prefixes and powers of 10. An are is 100 square meters (think 10 meters by 10 meters, or roughly 30ft by 30ft). A hectare is a hundred ar (from hecto=100, hectoliter is a 100 liters, hectopascal is a 100 pascal, etc.), so a hectare is 100*100=10000 square meters. There are 100 hectares to a square kilometer. Hectare is a convenient and commonly used unit, especially in agriculture.
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Yikes, you guys are just aching to get back to some customary system of units, aren't you? You have a beautiful system of easily scaled and converted units and immediately start shoehorning in goofy units like hectares and tonnes.
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I understand the rationalization for the creation of new units. What is happening with these new units, though, is the birth of a customary system. The origins of this particular customary system will be much more rational than any that came before it, but it will be just as clumsy and inconsistent as any other in the end. It's not that bad now, but wait until more silly units are made and people forget what twisted rationalizations begat those units.
You could use 1 square hectometer synonymously with 1 hectare, but that's a mouthful, and the are was a (redundant) part of an early proposal for the metric system, so the more convenient hectare stuck.
What you're describing here is, quite literally, a "custo
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You're having a hard time seeing the problem here because you're familiar with the units. FWIW, what you're feeling right now (the whole, "what's the problem?" feeling), is exactly how people in the US feel about their non-metric units. I use SI every day for work, so I'm familiar with metric (and like it very much), but not with the customary metric units (which break the elegance of SI to make people feel comfortable).
The issue with the units we've been discussing is "due to the many different conversion
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I suspect the majority of people haven't the slightest idea of what a hectare actually is -- I know I don't.
Just remember that 1 hectare is equal to 10.5 square femtoparsecs.
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What units would you suggest? Square meters are far to small to be convenient for most land-measuring applications, and square kilometers too large. And nobody sane is going to use acres if they can avoid it - too much hassle to accurately convert to meaningful SI units.
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Jocular saga, fraternal sibling.
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Tell me, Muse, of that apparatus of many resources, who wandered far and wide, after monitoring the planted fields. Many the men whose crops it saw, whose ways it learned. Many the sorrows it suffered on flight, while trying to bring itself and its data back alive. Yet despite its wishes it failed to save it, because of the corn foolishly projecting twice the cattle of Helios, the Sun, so the god denied them their return. Tell us of these things, beginning where you will, Goddess, Daughter of Zeus.
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The use of hectare (along with tonne, angstrom, and all the other customary metric units) deserves mockery. What's the point of having a nice metric system if you're going to make up new units instead of using the actual units provided by the system? This path leads directly back to customary units that can't be easily converted or computed (even if they were originally crafted from a rational system of units).
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Two dozen furlongs per fortnight is roughly 0.009 mph (0.014 kph). That's not so much "travelling" as it is "not quite sitting still."
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Two dozen furlongs per fortnight is roughly 0.009 mph (0.014 kph). That's not so much "travelling" as it is "not quite sitting still."
Only a pedant would call him out for that! It's pretty clear he intended to say "bakers dozens of furlongs per fortnight."
Farm topography (Score:4, Informative)
Depending on the accuracy obtained, such mapping would be highly useful on our farm for figuring out drainage. Some areas of a field might drain better with only a very small slope, if we knew where to put the channel. Currently the only real option is to drive over the field with an RTK GPS receiver and make a GIS map of elevations. Which works well enough (depending on the grid resolution; can get really old driving every 10 feet over 160 acres), but takes quite a long time to do.
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The problem is that slope required for adequate drainage can be a very gradual change in the elevation of the ground, but the drone is not in contact with the ground. GPS located photos are great for locating lat/lon of visible items, but getting the precise elevation would probably require surveyed reference points and the full 3D treatment.
Re:Farm topography (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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Think about the labor pool - when you put out a want-ad for new employees, what type of people are you likely to find? 3D projection software operators with understanding of how it works, when it lies to you due to sketchy input data, etc. - or.... can you find somebody willing to work for minimum wage who can watch TV and count cracks?
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There's a professor at Georgia Tech researching that sort of thing [ufl.edu], except for sidewalks instead of streets and using a tablet strapped to a wheelchair.
(Why yes, it is weird that I can only find an overview of a GA Tech professor's research on a ufl.edu site....)
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I while back I was looking at some for one of the areas that I hunt and it was accurate enough where you could see the ruts in the road where vehicles regularly drove down gravel roads. I can't find it at the moment but it was available in an interactive form online.
Why wouldn't you just make these measurements (Score:2)
when you were already out plowing or harvesting or fertilizing the fields? Why wouldn't you just do this continually over time to improve your maps, once you made the investment in the GPS receiver?
Hill climbing algorithm (Score:2)
So it makes it better, then makes that better?
FAA is not allowing Drone use in farming today (Score:3, Interesting)
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:FAA is not allowing Drone use in farming today (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree. Either by design or ineptitude the FAA couldn't put together a workable process for commercial UAS
For farmers (private land owners) below the navigational airspace (500 feet above obstacles) IMO this the land-owner's property and non of the FAA's domain.
i.e. the FAA is blowing smoke to threaten people out of working their own land until they can contort it into a regulatory money pump.
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According to court rulings, you actually own the first 83 feet. The most famous case of this kind comes from 1945 when a chicken farmer named Thomas Lee Causby sued the US government for flying approximately 83 feet above his property, the noise of which caused a bunch of Causby’s chicken’s to accidentally kill themselves by running into walls. Causby won his case and the courts agreed that although a property owner wasn’t entitled to own all of the air above their land, they were entitled
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Which is why most companies won't sign-off on it (and I'm not inspecting pipelines with mine). Though farmers (even incorporated ones) probably have a better chance of this playing out in court in their favor than any other venture.
Still haven't heard if the FAA's appeal was ever in court.
FAA Fine Dismissed [nbcnews.com]
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I believe there is a concept called "enjoyment of the land". The FAA has to pay land-owners for navigation right-of-way if flights (usually near airports) routinely go below 500 feet. Obviously not a legal coat hook, but sure seems like an indication the land owner owns that space.
Heck, now that I think about it I want the FAA to compensate me for limiting the use of my own airspace by threatening to fine me!
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I suspect if you want to build a 500-foot tall building you're going to run into regulatory issues above and beyond strictly engineering-related ones. Just because others are prohibited from using the space as they see fit does not imply that you are permitted to use it as you see fit.
An not entirely unrelated, if somewhat inverse, concept is that of right-of-ways, where just because you own the land does not give you the right to interfere with your neighbor passing through it to reach their own.
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Actually, constructing a building is constructing "an obstacle" (as long as said constructions whole intent is not to impair air traffic aka "spite towers"). Air traffic must now avoid the new obstacle by 500 ft.
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You may want to up that privacy fence. FAA rule 103 allows ultra-lights (unlicensed light-frame aircraft/no pilots license needed) to fly up to 1200 feet (and lower) right over your property and look right in your window no questions asked, no permission needed.
But contracted semi-autonomous/para-drones can't take pictures of a land owners own property with the land owners permission -- without first having an FAA permit, according to the FAA's spiel. And you can't get one! Permits are only granted to law
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I'm positing the farmer owns his own airspace: and if he wants to contract someone to fly his field with 20-pound drone or a paper airplane I believe he has the right to do so without anyone's permission.
And if the drone flies off course and crashes into the neighbors house/barn/cattle: the contractor is as liable as anyone trespassing and destroying property with a vehicle.
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Yes, I noticed that. Maybe as a reminder that the rest of the world is moving on with this whilst the US government manages to (at least verbally) stifle innovation.
And as one of the thousands of people who own a UAS in "the land of the free" who can't use it for anything but recreation, I never miss an opportunity to disparage FAA policy and pseudo-policy regarding drone use.
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Work hard, get strong, work harder, get stronger (Score:3)
What I wonder is, when these software enhancements are made, does hardware usually evolve to converge with the software? Meaning, in this example, if the software is using a new method for processing point data, does that not mean the hardware could be made to collect point data in a way more conducive to this new method?
And is this kind of progress a common thing? Is it common or rare this leapfrog progressive dance of hardware and software?
I'm aghast at the inconsistency in units. (Score:2)
Drones Could 3D-Map Scores of Hectares of Land In Just a Baker's Dozen of Milli-fortnights
Fixed for consistency.
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Scores is admittedly archaic, but I see it quite frequently in it's modern non-specific meaning. Hectares on the other hand are a fully modern unit - the SI analogue to the acre, which is a convenient size for measuring land for most human endeavors .
Not clear this is actually a 3D map (Score:2)
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I might be wrong but I believe they are concurrently using lidar, and the lidar point cloud is used to help facilitate the actual photogrammetry process. Where differing points in the point cloud are interpreted to help make a geometric vs a point cloud model based off of the images. This could goa very long way in helping convert a point cloud of accurate measurments into actual useable and reasonably accurate 3d models for BIM/Farming/Mapping etc. The map produced is very much a 3d model generated from
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I use a FARO scanner at times, and it attempts to do something similar. However they don't remotely attempt to make a solid out of the images. So it is either point cloud or not on the export. Within the Apps you can use both views and measure etc, but not being exportable to a true polygon isn't an option at the moment so people tend to take it to solid works or Rhino and make it manually.
You can get decent 3D modelling off of ortho with consistent overlap etc. But it isn't great yet. I assume this is goin
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Well, unless the land is perfectly flat, or your photos are taken from extreme high altitude, in order to accurately composite images taken from different positions (angles) you're probably going to have to build a 3D map of the surface. And assuming the photo and caption at the top of the article are actually related to the algorithm (admittedly not necessarily a safe assumption) it appears they're doing exactly that.
From reading the article it sounds to me that they've basically introduced some "slop" i
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I think it is attempting to remove the light as a source of distance measuring and using the point cloud to assist in making the models more accurate, but more so applying logic to the point clouds for actual surface generation vs doing it manually based off of a point cloud. This should make photogrammetry the preferrable method.
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Hmm, I didn't get the sense that there was any direct distance measurement of the scene at all, light source or no. I was simply working off the fact that any four or more non-coplanar points photographed from multiple locations will form a different arrangement in each photo - what appears to be triangle of treetops from one perspective may form a straight line from another, even as a different apparent straight line become a triangle. In order to reconcile those discrepancies so that the well-defined poi
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Acres? What is this, the 1700s? Please use a modern SI unit such as hectares.
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Exactly, in 1890 we used modern units, and 124 years later you still are using old ones (acres?)
Uh, isn't there 24 hours in a day?, so if 40 hectares were done in 4 hours, that would be 240 hectares done in 24 hours which is 2.4 square kilometers.
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Many (most?) surveys are historical - until such time as all surveys have been updated to high-precision GPS coordinates you'll need traditional surveyors.
And GPS surveying isn't without it's own issues - traditionally land divisions tended to follow natural boundaries - rivers, ridgelines, etc. And the land does not stand still - in geologically active regions surface features, including your house, may move a few feet per year. Build a fence along a GPS-surveyed boundary today, and in a few decades it m
Use of drones (Score:2)
Of course, this was exactly the kind of legitimate purpose people wanted drones to have all along, so actually much older than the drone issues people are usually excited about.
But the 3-D modelling math sounds very cool.