My understanding from talking to representatives about thermal mapping capabilities is that Skydio (or possibly FLIR?) is working with pix4D to make the boson+ sensor on the X10 compatible with processing thermal images in pix4D. Does anyone know if this is true and if there is any kind of timeline on it??
Perhaps I jumped to early, but I’m now a DJI ex-pat since my restoration work is often funded with federal funding. But I imagine, as the X10 becomes one of the few alternatives with a powerful thermal camera, that they have to be prioritizing it…
Hello @matt.holland,
Currently, the thermal camera from Skydio is not correctly detected with our software. They are detected as a RGB images and processed without radiometric data. We are working on this issue but we don’t provide any timeline. I recommend you to follow the release note page for the updates.
Hi Kapil,
I know we’ve already discussed this, and you were not able to provide much detail… but do you have any idea what kind of timeline we are talking about? Months? Or years?
Also, if the images are detected as RGB, can they be stitched as mosaics without the radiometric data? This would be better than nothing… I could toggle between the FLIR program and GIS to figure out relative temperatures, which will admittedly be a pain.
-Matt
This is a pressing issue for us as well.
Try it out.
Use the camera parameters from one of the 640 resolution cameras. Make sure you have the correct sensor size, pixel pitch.
Before Pix4D officially supported the DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced, many tinkered around to get it to process RGB thermal maps without the associated radiometric data.
Does Skydio allow you to save as a radiometric TIFF?
Yeah, i recently tried this with the “FLIR TAU” sensor selected as the “camera model”, which is the only model available to select that has a thermal band. Where can you adjust pixel pitch in the settings?
In any case, it put an ortho image together with some plausible looking DN’s and a good reconstruction, but how do those get translated to temperatures?
I assume the relationship between the DN’s (0-255) is not linear? i’ve got some ground truth data from temperature loggers, is there a way to calibrate the image by inputting this data?
Finally, the skydio collects radiometric jpgs, and as far as i know does not have a way to export radiometric tiffs…they import to GIS software as RGB though…the only way i’ve found to view temperatures is through FLIR thermal studio.
Hey Matt,
I am looking at your work with the X10 to see some temperature in pix4d. I am attempting to do the same thing did you create an IR band from the RGB thermal images? I just purchased this camera and am having a hard time processing imagery to see the soil temp.
Hey Wyatt,
I still haven’t heard anything new from Skydio nor Pix4D on where this is at, and both companies have been pretty ambiguous about any kind of timeline which has been extremely frustrating.
That being said, i’ve been able to semi-successfully create orthomosaics by setting adequate overlap (requires changing to the narrow FOV camera and high overlap, like 90%, such that the IR overlap is ~80%). Then in processing, there is a selection for the FLIR vue camera that actually creates the mosaic from the RJPG rather then treating the thermal images as RGB.
All that being said, the orthoimage appears to be accurate in a relative sense, but the calculation of the digital numbers into temperatures is the major hang up at this point. If you export the tiff into a GIS program, the numbers are on a scale of 0-256, and as i understand it, what we are waiting on the companies for is a series of constants/equations that transform those digital numbers into temperatures.
TLDR, this method can give you a good visual that you can cross reference with spot/area measurements on singular photos in FLIR tools, but it cant yet provide you with a manipulable geotiff for temperatures.
Thank you so much for the reply. It sounds like I will be waiting on the companies to do some R&D before the camera fully integrates into the Pix4D software. It looks like they added the sensefly duet T to the compatibility list of absolute temps. I have this in the arsenal and will have to fly a bigger fixed wing aircraft for a small plot study that would suit the X10 well.
