I am seriously considering purchasing a Micasense RedEdge-M for my crop surveys. It seems like a good combination of visible and IR+ in one pass. Micasense estimates that it will take about 27 minutes to fly 100 acres at 120 meters. I have a 200 acre parcel and using their settings, I get total flight time of just over 40 minutes with 1138 pictures with my copy of Mission Planner. Based Mission Planner, 100 acres would be around 600 images at a resolution of 8 cm per pixel.
For those of you using the RedEdge-M, about how long does it take to fully process images from a 100 acre survey? I realize there are a lot of variables in that question, including the specs of your computer as well as the parameters of your flight. Would a 200 acre survey take twice as long, or do the relative times increase as the size of the survey increases?
Thanks,
Mark
Hey Mark,
MicaSense RedEdge is a very reliable camera and it produces higher quality outputs compare to Parrot Sequoia. Like you mentioned there are many variables that would impact the processing time. Based on my experience it takes about 5-6 hours to process 100 acres field on 32 GB Ram 3TB HDD, 4.0 Ghz and GTX 1070 graphics card computer. I haven’t processed a 200 acre MicaSense RedEdge dataset but it would take longer than double time, probably triple time if not more. The relationship between the processing time and the size of the field is not linear.
Hi Selim,
Thank you for your reply. I’m glad to get confirmation that the RedEdge-M is indeed a good camera for crop surveys.
How many images make up a 100 acre survey? 5-6 hours seems like a long time for roughly 600 images, if my Mission Planner estimate is correct. Although, the more I think about it, it is more like 3,000 images, isn’t it? (One for each camera within the array.) I have a system very similar to yours, and have been using another software package for stitching, and 5-6 hours for 3,000 or so images is about right.
What would speed that up? More RAM, faster GPU, multiple GPU’s, or SSD for the active set being stitched?
Thanks again,
Mark
Hey Mark,
3000 images sounds about right, I had aproximately 3500-4000 images for 100 acres projects. It may be 600x5 then it would be around 3000. More RAM would definitely make a big difference in terms of processing speed, GPU and SSD would also impact the processing speed.
Hi Selim,
Thank you for confirming that. It helps me gauge how much time I’ll need to allocate to post-production as well as a hardware budget.
Mark
Hey Mark,
No worries. If you have additional questions you can add me to LinkedIn or you can shoot me an email at selim.erguden@gmail.com