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You have been able to do this for a long time. Photogrammetry apps with a good, automated drone pipeline: https://www.dronedeploy.com/ https://www.dronedeploy

You have been able to do this for a long time. Photogrammetry apps with a good, automated drone pipeline: https://www.dronedeploy.com/ https://www.dronedeploy.com/ https://www.pix4d.com/ https://www.pix4d.com/ Generic photogrammetry: https://www.capturingreality.com/ https://www.capturingreality.com/ https://www.agisoft.com/ https://www.agisoft.com/ https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom I don't really understand what's unique about this patent, Structure from Motion has been around for ages, from video too. Maybe they have some optimisation around the processing, which traditionally is quite compute intensive

raxxorrax 7y ago
Stereoscopy is very difficult in computer vision if you want accuracy. There are certainly many unexplored possibilities and strategies to match two images. Something optimized for buildings, trees, vehicles and their geometric shapes is probably likely. What I ask myself is why they do not use a form of projection like lasers. If I were to build a drone, it would have a ton of lasers...
- namibj 7y ago
  You want to use the sun as a light source. The power you'd need due to the numerical aperture being very small and thus most illumination not getting back to your drone reaches infeasible levels from about a few hundred meters onwards.
- jefft255 7y ago
  Drone laser scanning is a thing! It’s just more expensive, heavy and power consuming (so in a sense power consumption increase from two aspects).
- dharma1 7y ago
  Photogrammetry isn't really about stereoscopy, it's about building a dense point cloud representation based on many images from different angles, then transforming that to a mesh (and often mapping the textures from photos onto it). You can also do point cloud with lidar from drones, just tends to be more expensive and heavier - https://enterprise.dji.com/news/detail/how-lidar-is-revolutionizing-mapping-and-geospatial-data https://enterprise.dji.com/news/detail/how-lidar-is-revoluti...
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    Isn't that called stereoscopy? Matching points from different positions and your viewport coordinates lets you extract point coordinates via triangulation? That would net you a heightmap if you manage to match everything present in all images which then can be transformed into a mesh. But sure, just having a good camera is probably a lot cheaper than using a projection of any form. Probably also significantly faster.

raxxorrax 7y ago

Stereoscopy is very difficult in computer vision if you want accuracy. There are certainly many unexplored possibilities and strategies to match two images. Something optimized for buildings, trees, vehicles and their geometric shapes is probably likely. What I ask myself is why they do not use a form of projection like lasers. If I were to build a drone, it would have a ton of lasers...

namibj 7y ago
You want to use the sun as a light source. The power you'd need due to the numerical aperture being very small and thus most illumination not getting back to your drone reaches infeasible levels from about a few hundred meters onwards.
jefft255 7y ago
Drone laser scanning is a thing! It’s just more expensive, heavy and power consuming (so in a sense power consumption increase from two aspects).
dharma1 7y ago
Photogrammetry isn't really about stereoscopy, it's about building a dense point cloud representation based on many images from different angles, then transforming that to a mesh (and often mapping the textures from photos onto it). You can also do point cloud with lidar from drones, just tends to be more expensive and heavier - https://enterprise.dji.com/news/detail/how-lidar-is-revolutionizing-mapping-and-geospatial-data https://enterprise.dji.com/news/detail/how-lidar-is-revoluti...
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Isn't that called stereoscopy? Matching points from different positions and your viewport coordinates lets you extract point coordinates via triangulation? That would net you a heightmap if you manage to match everything present in all images which then can be transformed into a mesh. But sure, just having a good camera is probably a lot cheaper than using a projection of any form. Probably also significantly faster.