Emerging techology
The use of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is an important emerging technology for primary producers and resource managers. SkyView Solutions has experience with fixed-wing UAV operation in a wide range of conditions using both colour and near-infra-red (NIR) photography. We specialise in UAVs that can be operated in crops and from small, unprepared landing zones.
Small UAVs have several advantages over conventional aerial photography and satellite imaging. UAV imagery is available on-demand, full ground coverage free of cloud is guaranteed, and most importantly UAVs can obtain ultra-high resolution images – 2cm ground resolution is possible if required. One advantage over satellite remote sensing is that there are no minimum area requirements for obtaining imagery.
The CropCam
Prototype of the SkyView Swift airframe.
The Swinglet airframe.
Ultra-high resolution images can be used for weed detection, tracking feral animal populations, carbon accounting, creating high resolution photo-maps for a variety of purposes (e.g. land-use studies), generating indices of crop health and nutrition and creating nutrition maps to guide variable rate fertiliser spreaders.
A key limitation in using UAVs has been the inability to efficiently combine individual images into a georeferenced mosaic. In conventional aerial photography, orthorectification precedes mosaicing and relies on both ground control points and a digital elevation model. UAV photography covers relatively small areas making this approach impractical. SkyView Solutions has found a solution for this problem during one of our recent projects, and our findings will be published in the near future.
UAV services are not currently available for commercial hire but we can assist you with:
- Commissioning imagery
- Stitching and geo-referencing aerial images
- Generating plant health indices (e.g. NDVI, CCCI)
- Creating plant nutrition maps for variable rate fertiliser spreaders
The full-size SkyView Swift airframe.
Digital elevation models
SkyView Solutions has been developing new applications for creating digital elevation models from stereo UAV imagery. This work is in partnership with Sensefly and Pix4D from Switzerland. The processing includes the automatic external and internal orientation of the input images, the computation of an orthographic image, its robust geo-referencing and the creation of digital surface models. A large number of overlapping geotagged photos of an area is used to create a stereo model and from this both a camera model and a set of 3D points are derived. The point cloud is then transformed to a triangular mesh which creates the 3D surface. This surface is then smoothed and finally rendered with a high resolution aerial photo mosaic of the area.
