Helicopter Aerial Photography

Just finished collecting data for the last part of my dissertation (Hooray!!!). Just thought I'd share some of the results. The photos were processed with Agisoft Photoscan Pro and the orthophotos ended up with a resolution of 5cm (which is exactly what I wanted). Great first results and special thanks to Mark Croghan at the Bureau of Reclamation for the funding and Troy Woydziak at Baker Aircraft for his great piloting.

Kinect Software Links

Here is some of the software I've tried out for getting data out of a stock XBOX 360 Kinect. There is a ton of info out there on hacking the Kinect to do your bidding in terms of 3D scanning.
SCANECT
RGB Demo
SCENECT

All of these use the OpenNI drivers for the Kinect

Bonus...some academic lit. on using the connect as a sensor
by Ken Mankoff in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms

The Kinect: a low-cost, high-resolution, short-range 3D camera

- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/esp.3332/abstract

Updated SfM Software Links

My original post on SfM software is here.

There are a growing number of Structure-from-Motion (SfM) software packages out there, here are some of the ones that I've come in contact with. VisualSfM would be the place I would start...

Helilite Picavet

For our Helikite (http://www.allsopp.co.uk/) the stock camera mount wasn't doing the trick for what we needed. We decided to build a picavet to hang underneath. With some direction from Charles Benton's website (http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/kap/equip/picavet.html) we constructed the cradle from some 1/4" basswood, a few small screw eyes, and a bent metal coat hanger to attach the camera to the cross. The whole thing was attached to the balloon with two Prusik knot loops (the pink string on the bottom photo).

3D Coordinate Transformations

JAG3D is a large software package that can be used for geodetic correction of survey data, however, buried within the interface is a nice compact module for performing full 3D coordinate transformations.


This tutorial is for JAG3D version 3.3.20110211 (published Feb. 11, 2011)