Experience With UAS

Volumetrics is important in an area that works with dirt and other types of material that are hard to calculate using traditional methods. Pix4D and ArcGIS allow the user to measure volumes using the altitude of a pile compared to the altitude of the surrounding area. this is a pretty clever and useful way for many industries to keep track of their stockpiles. Using Pix4D's Volume tool, users can draw lines around an area to select out of a larger DS. This will allow Pix4D to calculate the area for just the highlighted area. the next picture is what the program looks like after you highlight the stockpiles. Users can choose from several methods to calculate volumetrics. I used each method was used so that their results could be compared.  These methods have various strengths and weaknesses. The average or lowest bases are good options for this data because they allow the industry operation to see how large the pile is with either a base calculated from the nearby ground o...

Intro One of the main goals of this week's lab was to show how GCPs can affect the results of the data processing. A GCP or ground control point is a tool that is used to manually place reference points for later use in processing. Pix4D, the software used in the processing of this project, is able to be used to manually locate and realign GCPs to the appropriate locations.  Process Before one can get started with aligning GCPs, you must first get your point cloud created and work from there. Once the point load has been created you can see with the tool used to correct GCPs that most of the points do not align with the marked GCP locations in the images. To correct this, we go into this tool and manual search for the marked locations that the GCPs where located. for this location, the GCPs were marked with orange arrows. After correcting the GCPs, you need to rematch and reoptimize the images. This is an automatic process you can start by clicking the rematch and reopt...