Ortho Image Use | Drones - Accuracy and Opportunity for Surveyors

Our Consulting & Services Manager, Shawn Herring, wrote a great article on surveying industry insights on drones. Here's a portion of the article:

Drones, drones, drones!  Over the past few years this may be the biggest industry trend for land surveyors and civil engineers, and probably just as important of a shift as GPS data collectors.

I started a surveying firm in 2010 with a focus on ALTA surveys, general boundary and topo projects, mass volume calculations, as well as construction staking.  We then got into a little LiDar scanning and really jumped into aerial data capture about 5 years ago and have never looked back!

I love data capture, whether from the ground or from the air, and trying to keep up with the daily technology trends and advances can sometimes be overwhelming.  I thought I’d put together this article on some of the lessons we’ve learned over the past few years when it comes to utilizing a drone in our survey department.

Ortho Image Use

We are working with larger data than ever before.  Drone data and aerial imagery is now at the tips of our fingers anytime we want them.  Some raster images can be many GB in size and resolution that some design softwares can’t handle.  If you have ever tried to import a GeoTiff (or other image types), and you get the “Invalid Image” warning, then QGIS is exactly what you need!

This is a FREE open source software tool that allows you to quickly and easily reduce the size of large images, and even translate to other coordinate systems if you’d like.  Just go to www.qgis.org and download it.

You simply drag and drop your image into the QGIS desktop, right-click on your layer (image) and export to a new rendered image!  This can take a 2GB image, reduce it to 200MB and not lose the quality of image you’d expect from your flight data.

If you'd like to learn more insights on drones in the land surveying industry, click here.