September 2017 – SkyCam.io

Mapping Points

If you’re familiar with mapping, you’ve no doubt heard talk of ground control points (GCPs). Used often in the surveying industry, as well as in virtual design and construction, GCPs greatly increase the global accuracy of drone maps. Although they are not necessary in every situation, GCPs are a vital tool for precision mapping. But what exactly are ground control points?

Ground control points are large marked targets on the ground, spaced strategically throughout your area of interest. It might be helpful to think of your GCPs as a series of thumbtacks placed on your drone map. Because the drone mapping software knows the exact location of each of these “thumbtacks”, it can reference their locations when it matches up all of the other points on the map.

When used correctly, ground control points greatly improve the global accuracy of your drone map. That is to say, they help ensure that the latitude and longitude of any point on your map corresponds accurately with actual GPS coordinates. This is important in situations where precision mapping and true global accuracy are needed. As we mentioned above, surveying companies generally use GCPs, because a high level of global accuracy is important in most of the work that they do. Virtual design and construction is another sector that often requires this level of precision drone mapping.

It is now possible for enterprise and business users to process ground control points directly in SkyCam.io’s partner platform.

Insurance Study

After a disaster, it’s important to clean up and rebuild, but it’s also critical to capture the site as it is so that the damage can be assessed. SkyCam.io mapping gives insurance companies a fast, easy way of accurately documenting the scene, preserving key details while letting the process of clean-up and reconstruction begin as quickly as possible

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE:

Earlier this year, a major fire broke out at a vacation destination of 5 acres, destroying over 80 small housing units with damage valued at over $50 Million.

Once the flames had subsided, the insurance company came in to assess the damage. The sheer size of the site posed a unique challenge. To make matters worse, many of the roofs damaged by fire were made of thatch and were not strong enough to support an inspector climbing on them to inspect damage. The loss adjuster quickly realized that it would be very difficult to get a clear picture of what had happened from the ground.

Although a plane had already captured some photos after the disaster, the photos were not sharp enough to be of much use. The loss adjuster recommended the insurance company use a drone service to help assess the area, so the insurance company had the site mapped.

Once on site, the drone pilot flew at 180 feet to collect more than 300 geo-tagged photos covering the area. The pilot then uploaded all the imagery to the Online APP for processing. Three hours later, a 2D map and 3D model were complete and available in the cloud. That’s when the real work began.

Since the map was hosted in the Cloud APP, it could be easily shared via email or by hyperlink and became a central tool where the team could collaborate and share findings. Information collected on site by the loss adjuster and insurance inspector, as well as meteorological data about wind direction, was added to the plan as notes, comments and measurements. In addition to counting the number of damaged units (80), the map, combined with APP’s suite of analysis tools, allowed them to instantly estimate the volume of debris to be removed.

In this case, the main issue at stake was how the fire had spread and who was responsible. As the team began analyzing the map, several theories emerged. The first hypothesis was based on the wind direction on the day of the fire, and posited that the fire had begun at a neighboring field on the north side of the housing after burning of old vegetation for agricultural purposes. But after looking closely at the the northwesterly-most point of damage, they identified the first few units to be consumed by the blaze and determined that the fire must have started in or around one of the housing units in this area. Since these units were not on their customer’s property, the insurance company could demonstrate that their customer was not responsible for the fire.

Farm Services

You hear a lot about ‘actionable data’ in the agriculture industry. From human scouting to satellite imagery, to drones, there are many ways of collecting crop data. But how available is that data? Services from SkyCam.io help growers and agronomists access multispectral crop imagery on demand, and make sense of that data through their partnership with an online portal service. Farmers can view real-time results, and get to work addressing any issues they may find in minutes—not days or weeks.