Drone images to ArcGIS

[Ha Tran]

Hello everyone.

I am on my internships in Greece for an NGO, and currently, we are having a small projects on mapping the Posidonia Oceanica seagrass in a small bay using sonar technique combined with a drone's aerial images. The images come out fine, but I am having trouble trying to georeference the images into Arcmap. All the drone images have their metadata included Lat and Long as well as Altitude. Unfortunately, the Lat and Long only shows where the drone was when the pictures were taken, so to project the image into GIS system, it takes a lot of works to do so.

Now I want to ask if there are any solutions that can assist me in projecting the drone's aerial images to Arcmap/ any GIS applications. As we are an NGO, we don't have such a large budget, but any recommendation whether free or not will be considered.

Thank you. 

[GIS in Ecology]

Hi Ha Tran,

This is very interesting question. Traditionally, the way you would have processed such aerial images is to 'mosaic' them all together in an image processing software package to create one single image. This image would them be added to your GIS software and georeferenced using standard georeferencing tools based on the latitude and longitude of known locations within the image. This is a long and drawn-out process, and can be difficult if you do not have easily recognisable locations in your images that you can obtain the latitude and longitude of. 

However, while I haven't used them, it looks like there are now some purpose build tools for processing drone images to create georeferenced images. Of the ones I could find, one called OpenDroneMap seems the most promising, and it is free. You can download this from here: https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/OpenDroneMap, while you can find a nice video about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2qp3o8caPs. You can also find out more about it here: https://smathermather.wordpress.com/category/opendronemap/.

I hope this helps, and if you choose to try out OpenDroneMap, could you post back on this thread and let the community know whether it worked for you or not?

Good luck with your project.

All the best,

Colin

[Ha Tran]

I checked out OpenDroneMap, however, I have had no background with GitHub platform nor coding in general.

Nonetheless, I found out about MapKnitter, which is an online website that let user knit their own maps, albeit with limited functions, for free. However, the maps you created there will be made available to the public.