Pixhawk 2.1 and a 5 Camera Rig

Hardware Pixhawk family
1

Hi Ardupilot community,

I’m in the beginning stages of a fairly ambitious project to replace very expensive manned aircraft with a VTOL drone using a custom 5 Camera rig to survey large areas for humanitarian purposes.

The goal is to use the drone to capture a combination of Oblique (North, East, South, West) and Nadir images during a single pass to maximize the operational efficiency of the drone.

We’ve done testing and found that drones that geo-tag the images (Such as the Phantom 4 or Mavic 2) generally do a great job after we process the images & metadata with Something like PIX4D.

I’m hoping I can replicate that process, but the sensor I’ve chosen doesn’t geo-tag the images with either the Lat/Long or camera orientation. I’ve seen several guides on how to geo-tag images from a single camera. (Generally facing strait down) but I’m unaware of a way that I can easily tag all of the images consistently.

I hope this topic found the right forum, if not, any direction to a good source of information would certainly be appreciated.

EDIT: I wanted to add that the Oblique images are captured at a 45 degree angle.

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If the cameras are all the same without autofocus, they triggered with the same trigger signal, then you can assume that the shutter lag is the same (at least within the resolultion of the trigger logging). So, log the trigger event from one camera then use the same log to geotag all five set of pictures.

3

This is what I’m thinking, I assume that software like Pix4d will prove the orientation values of the Oblique images (Omega, Phi, Kappa)? Or do I need to do something before/during Geotagging each image set to establish those values?

Thanks for the response btw.

4

Usually orientation values are not needed, the processing software will figure out, geotags are sufficient to put the pictures at the right place. But I’m not an expert on photogrametry…

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