Stitching Photos To Make Property Maps.

One of the products I would like to experiment with and offer to clients is large, high definition pictures of an entire property.

It could be helpful to people like me, as a tool to plan out our property. The idea came to me when I was studying Permaculture. I thought that starting with a good picture that could be modified to design property layouts would be a nice tool. Other farm owners and any other number of different use cases might benefit from this kind of tool.

I'm not completely sure that it is a product many "average" farm owners would want, or not, but I'm still going to experiment with it and show people how it can be created and used.

I've played around with this before using my 3DR Solo, but the fundamental problem was that the GoPro Hero 4 Black that it uses has a pretty severe fish-eye effect. That is a problem when stitching the photos together to make the end product. The pictures came out pretty bad.

Now, I have the Autel Evo and the camera on this drone is worlds better for this.

Using Autel Evo's Mission Planner on their app, I mapped out my property and took took the pictures. Mission planner lays out a grid and the drone goes back and forth taking pictures. My eleven acres took about 17 minutes to complete in the air.

Then, I fired up Hugin, imported the pictures and started processing. Even with my state-of-the-art ThingPad P52, this has taken all afternoon and into the evening - so far.

It's still processing...

So basically, at this point, an eleven acre property takes all day to shoot and process. Clearly, that isn't going to cut it, but I'm betting there are ways to optimized the process much more.