Duke Forest

Well, it has been a little while since the last time I posted and there is quite a bit to talk about since then. First of all, Marcus and I went to Duke Forest on Saturday and flew all of 4 of the plots that we wanted to fly. In short, it was a pretty incredible day of flying with ~70 km of linear flight in ~120 minutes. We imaged 2 plots per flight and used the "multilooked" method Miles discussed earlier on the blog. Here is a look at our first flight:

You can distinctly see where we took off in the open field as well as the two plots we imaged in this flight. The colors indicate flight modes, with orange being manual and the green being auto. Below is the profile of our second flight:

The images from these flights are looking pretty good, although we have a clear need for a higher-quality camera. Below you can see the preliminary mosaic of our second flight:

This is only a subset of the mosaic which excludes peripheral areas which are not in the area of interest and are not imaged well. You can see a few errors along the road at the top; Photoscan is known to produce errors along straight lines.

Finally, here is what I am affectionately calling the Asnerian View (an oblique view of the 3D model):

So, from this we have learned quite a bit. We have learned that the camera we are using in the Catfish has a few idiosyncrasies which we are learning to overcome along with a diminutive sensor which makes collecting good imagery on anything other that a bright, sunny day quite difficult (the sky when we made these flights was overcast). All in all, though, we have proven that the Catfish is a really great, reliable system for imaging large areas in a short amount of time. Our next project for it will be to go to Pilot Mountain and image the knob.