Mapping Roads with GoPro Hero 4 Silver

PIX4Dcapture
1

Good Afternoon

I’m interested in doing a 3D Mapping of different roads in my city to minimize our surveying work with total stations. I have a GoPro Hero 4 Silver and I want to know how can I make the image acquisition (using oblique images, for example), using a little number of GCP’s. I need to make the 3D mapping of around 12 kilometers of roads, and I will rent the Pix4D Mapper Pro for one month to do that.
The roads of interest have intersections between each others.

Also, I want to know if I can use a 4K video to do that, but I want to do it using full resolution (12MP) fisheye photos.

Any tip you can give me will be extremely appreciated.

Thank you very much,

2

Dear Alejandro,

If possible, we recommend using still images at the highest resolution. This would give the best results. If you want to use videos, please have a look here

https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/205294735

If you would like to map roads, this would fall in the category that we call corridor mapping. We suggest making several flight lines. If you make a single flight line, the use of many GCPs would be essential to get a good reconstruction. You can find our recommendations on this topic here

https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/202557459#label6

If you must fly with a single line, you can find our recommendations for GCPs here (again though, we recommend making several lines if possible)

https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/202559299

It is important to have enough side overlap (we recommend 60%). If you can have 3 lines, it would be better, but you could also get good results with 2 lines. The photos can be taken at any angle. Though if you want to map the road, we expect it would work well to point the camera straight at the ground.

3

Alejandro,

I would love to see some of your results. This is something I planned on trying out during our off-season.

Have you tried mapping fill volumes of pot holes or wheel ruts?

4

I would love to hear how these projects have gone for you guys. I would like to do some similar projects and I am sure that the results would be better now with the newer gopro’s .

Thanks