Abstract

HERNANDEZ-COLE, Javier; VILLALOBOS-BARQUERO, Verónica; GUEVARA-BONILLA, Mario  and  ORTIZ-MALAVASI, Edgar. Flight planning and data processing of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in forest plantation monitoring. Kurú [online]. 2024, vol.21, n.48, pp.56-65. ISSN 2215-2504.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18845/rfmk.v21i48.7041.

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for monitoring forest plantations is a potential useful tool but requires proper planning. Two softwares, four processing tools options and four flight parameters were evaluated to obtain orthomosaics in forest plantations located in Costa Rica. It was found that Pix4Dmapper® software requires less time for image processing, especially when using computers with at least 15 GB of RAM. The number of images to process per hectare can be lowered by reducing the spatial resolution of the images and using a flight plot (2D). The WebODM® software produced more processing failures, but the generated orthomosaics had fewer omission areas than those generated with Pix4Dmapper®. The proportion of processing failures is related to the number of images to be processed and the spatial resolution of the images. The best combinations to obtain orthomosaics were achieved using Pix4Dmapper® with flights at 120 meters, using a camera angle of 90° and a combination of overlap between images of 80 % frontal and 70 % lateral.

Keywords : Drones; Photogrammetric processing software; Pix4Dmapper; WebODM; orthomosaics.

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