Applied dronocartography

Two rhinos in the Kuzikus National Reserve, Namibia.

With the rapid development of drones, modern cartography has received an excellent tool for creating very detailed maps of small areas, from several tens and hundreds of square kilometers to individual households. It is many times cheaper than using airplanes or satellites, and allows you to achieve a very high degree of detail. A lot of businesses around the world have already been built on the use of drones for aerial photography. For example, when the US military needed to map the minefields in one of the valleys in Afghanistan, Tudor Thomas, a specialist in aerial photography, helped them. Under his leadership, an aviation mapping system was created, which in 2013 cost the US Army and its contractors from one to five million dollars. And here the cost of the aircraft was not included. But everything needed to be done, relatively speaking, a few photos from the air.

Thanks to this story, Thomas had a business idea - mapping with drones. Customers could rent or buy a drone to take photos with it. Although it must be admitted that at that time this idea could not be called innovative, many entrepreneurs around the world were already earning in this way.

However, Thomas and his colleagues decided to go ahead and created software that “sticks together” images taken from different points into a common map. Created on the basis of cloud technologies, the system adjusts the photos so that they appear to be made from the same angle, this process is called orthotransformation. If it is possible to accurately indicate the GPS coordinates of any control points on the ground, a separate software allows you to create a map with spatial reference.
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Thomas called his project Maps Made Easy and successfully raised the necessary funds for Kickstarter. Customers appeared immediately, mostly land owners, but a lot of people who were just keen on cartography. Many people are attracted to the opportunity to get a very detailed photo map of their area in this project, because in the same Google Maps data is often updated every few years, and the maximum resolution is very small by today's standards. With the help of drones, you can create a map with details about 20 times higher than that of Google Earth. Moreover, now the company of Thomas offers not just photo maps, but also creates three-dimensional models from them.

Moore's law against aerial photography

Geologist Larry Hulbert using Maps Made Easy made a map of the area in which he conducted surveys to search for nickel, copper or platinum. The photos themselves were taken from a helicopter, and to assemble them into a single image, Hulbert used the MME software tool. The result was a narrow map of 7 by 0.3 km (2.1 sq. Km.) Worth $ 44. True, here you need to include the cost of renting a helicopter with a pilot - $ 1,800 per hour. As a result, for the money spent on a couple of hours of shooting you could buy your own excellent drone.

Dronogumanism

Another example of the visual advantage of using drones is the story of Patrick Meier, director of social innovation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute. By order of Meier, 90 flights were conducted over the Kuzikus National Reserve in Namibia to search for black rhinos on the verge of extinction, as well as a number of other animals. Due to mass poaching, spurred by the demand for rhinoceros tusks, now there are about 29,000 of these animals left (in 1970 there were 70,000, and in 1900 - 500,000).

At first glance, drones turned out to be a very useful tool, since with their help one could quickly scan large areas and tell the rangers where to look for rhinos. However, the researcher faced another problem - how to view more than 25,000 images in search of rhinos?

To solve this problem, Meyer attracted volunteers who were supposed to look at the pictures and outlines the found animals. About 500 people from all over the world took part in this crowdsourcing project, and in just two days they processed 98% of the images. Meyer is also in talks with the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, about using their artificial intelligence algorithms to automate the photo processing process. In particular, to assess the damage done to coconut plantations after a hurricane in the Philippines.

Specialists around the world only welcome the use of drones for specific tasks in search and evaluation, since the pictures taken with their help have higher resolution, are cheaper, and can be obtained much faster and easier.

Where are the bodies buried?

Diensgrange cemetery (Deansgrange), Ireland.

Another example of the use of drones for obtaining detailed information about a territory is the cemetery in Northern Ireland. When planning their territory for new graves, many large cemeteries are usually guided by documents and plans that have been around for more than a decade. This often leads to errors and overlays. When it comes to thousands of plots, situations inevitably arise when registered sites are occupied, and vice versa.

As a result, the managers of Dinsgrange cemetery resorted to the services of a drone and created an up-to-date map of the entire territory with an exact indication of whether each section is occupied and by whom. Previously, it took about 100 hours to update the data on 12 acres of the cemetery: it was necessary to mark the GPS coordinates of each occupied area. The drone solved this problem in about two hours. It was enough to link several control points, as all the plots were placed in automatic mode. Then each site was compared data on the buried.

Conclusion

There are many examples of using drones for such “dot” cartography. For example, they can be used to assess the situation in a certain disputed territory. Or make an up-to-date map of difficult terrain, assess the consequences of natural disasters, get an accurate picture of the state of the acquired land plot, outline the boundaries of river spills, and so on and so forth. Given the active development and cheapening of the technical base, drones, it can be assumed that over the next few years cartographic software will appear on the market, adapted for use with images from drones. Perhaps it already exists, and if you know about this, then tell us in the comments. We are sure that this information will be interesting and useful to many.