Best Practices for Processing Images in Cliff Areas

419
0
03-14-2019 01:30 PM
DavidSchwab1
New Contributor

I frequently fly in reservoir areas that sometime contain large cliffs.  Most flight planning softwares do not have terrain awareness so the AGL height of the drone will not adjust with the terrain.  Maps Made Easy does, but they reference 30M DEM's that do not capture the abrupt nature of the cliffs and so the compensation for AGL height is not adequate. 

I have mitigated this in two ways.  First is to do two flights at different heights.  My question here is: is it ok to load two sets of images from different heights to one processing run?  I have done this before and the results looked good but not sure if it would be better/more accurate to process each set of images separately then mosaic them together in GIS.

My other main question is that I receive errors in the DSM in areas that have large cliffs, as the vertical face does not render very well.  So would including oblique images into the 2D processing help correct this?  Drone2Map only seems to recommend oblique imagery for 3D projects but I am wondering if it would be helpful in DSM generation in cliff areas.  Finally, if I include oblique, and nadir images from two different heights will that mess up the processing or introduce errors?  Just curious basically how best to deal with mapping areas with cliffs.

0 Replies