Friday, January 25, 2019

OpenDroneMap, Free Drone Mapping Software


If you have a drone, like a DJI Phantom, you possibly would like to make sometimes photo mosaics, or more precise orthoimages. Commercial software, however, is expensive and many users won’t spend thousands on software they will use only several times a year. There are various free mission planning software packages, like Pix4D, DJI Ground Station (DJI GS) which run on IOS, or Android tablets. Flyig a grid mission, collecting images and getting the data into your computer, you will need software to stich the images together. Here comes OpenDroneMap, a free, open source software package, running on Windows, Mac and Linux. For details go to https://www.opendronemap.org/ . I have run the software on a laptop computer, using the docker environment. There are now several options to use ODM, Nativel (Linux Ubuntu 16.04), through docker (Windows, Mac and Linux) or by using the WebODM API.

Easiest is possibly the WebODM, which gives you a browser GUI to overcome the problem of (not complicated actually) line commands. I have tested the software systematically, and in a desktop environment several hundreds of images can be converted into an orthophoto, digital elevation model (DEM) and point cloud. For larger datasets, I would use a cloud computing service, with for example 120 M RAM and 20 cores, I used this to process 2800 images successfully. For a desktop application I would suggest 32 M RAM as minimum, although 16 could work.

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