Looking for Best Practices for Capturing Corridor Imagery Using Drone for Drone2Map

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10-31-2019 01:51 PM
DavidKunz1
New Contributor

I am looking for best practices for establishing a drone flight for a corridor type project.  What are the suggested setting for imagery capture during the pre-planning of the mission?  I'm interested in settings such as flight elevation, overlap (forward/backward, and right/left), image quality, flight lines,etc.

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CodyBenkelman
Esri Regular Contributor

70% to 80% overlap, both along flightlines and between flightlines

You must have overlapping flightlines - a single flightline along a corridor will not work

Altitude depends on the resolution you want, but my advice is to test a higher flight - perhaps max altitude of 400' - because this will reduce # of images, # of flightlines, total data volume, and processing time - then run a test project and determine if you really need higher resolution --> lower altitude (which means more images, more flight time, more disk space, and longer processing time) to complete your project.

I don't know what you might be seeking in terms of image quality...?  Get the best quality possible (e.g. good exposure - minimize ANYTHING that's overexposed - and proper shutter speed vs. drone flight speed to ensure you don't get blurring).  

I edited my response because I forgot to mention the importance of ground control.  It's always recommended if you care about accuracy, and if you're creating 3D products that need to be at the proper height relative to ground.  If neither of these are important, you can ignore ground control.  If you want control but don't have surveyed control that you know is accurate, you can (in most cases, pending your specific site and ability to find permanent features) extract control from the ArcGIS Online Imagery Basemap, but note the Z value extracted from the online Terrain service may be low accuracy.

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