My Phantom 3 results have gone from great to unusable

When I first began learning with the phantom 3, I flew grids by free flying and produced great topographic results.  About a month ago, I started experimenting with autonomous flight and collecting photographs on a true grid.  I have calculated my desired GSD and flown the appropriate heights with plenty of overlap, and I have not been able to produce one result that didn’t have a distortion.  The distortions range from slight to completely absurd.   My latest attempt placed the photos and the automatic tie points on the same plane.  I am fairly confident that the problem is being caused by the camera model settings.  I have tried every setting that I can think to try, but I have yet to resolve the issue.  Any help would be great appreciated.

Jamie   

I am experiencing the same trouble on the calculation, maybe because of the take off location causing this, try to take off at the very average height of the field. also, downgrading the program version helps too.

This problem is somewhat being tackled in another post: 

Collectively curved images and consequently curved models.

in processing subsection.  The problem is being caused by the software not correctly calculating (Knowing?) the correct internal camera parameters.  No real solution yet.

I usually capture DNG and process them on photoshop as jpg before importing to Pix4D, it makes it worse.

If you are loading .DNG into photoshop and converting, it’s possible you are stripping the geo-tags from the meta data through this process. I would have a look if this is the case. There are some geo-spatial plugs for Photoshop that will retain that info through the process.

kind regards

Colin

Hi all,

We have commented on the distortion issue in this post if you want to have a look:
https://community.pix4d.com/t/4646

Let us know your experience and if the problem remains.

Regards,