Making photo and video from a height successfully solves lots of problems: cartography, determination of land boundaries, gathering geodetic and archaeological data, making films and ads.
Aerial photography can be performed either by means of manned aircraft or by small unmanned aerial system (SUAS) that is much more efficient and low-cost in many cases. For instance, surveying from satellite enables maximum resolution about 0.5 m, insufficient for accurate mapping. Other disadvantages include slow implementation and high cost of this method. As for manned aircrafts extremely expensive maintenance and fuel make this way unacceptable for local application.
Unmanned system can fly at an attitude of 100 m, multicopter even lower, which gives an advantage to cover small areas of land, enables to avoid clouds on video and use low-cost video equipment. The fact of pilot absence gives opportunity to record scenes of dangerous events. Besides, SUAS is easy delivered to the place of interest by usual transport.
SUAS performs automatic or semi-automatic flight above the area of interest and collects georeferenced video and photo data for accurate cartography. High-quality video and photo are being obtained regardless of the weather due to improved stabilizing gimbals. Special software composes data to synthesize height maps, 2D and 3D maps and globes and orthophotos.
For all this reasons, SUAS advantages are obvious: easy photo and video making, quick and accurate results, various operating effects reduce costs and time required for effective air photography.
SUAS air photography applications:
– Small territories cartography
– Monitoring of special objects like power lines, pipelines and highways
– Real time HD information
– Aerial photography in emergency areas