What the heck is drone data anyway?
Drone data is reinventing how we map, visualize, and analyze the world around us. Gathered with a drone that costs as little as $300, it opens the world of remote sensing to everyone. This data includes high-resolution aerial imagery and videos — offering expansive and detailed perspectives of landscapes, architectural structures, and diverse terrains. But its value extends beyond visual images. It also integrates vital information such as precise GPS coordinates and altitude to enhance the geospatial context of the images.
This enhanced nature of drone data makes it versatile and meaningful across many sectors, including agriculture, construction, environmental monitoring, and urban planning. It is the newest frontier of geospatial analysis. It dramatically improves the precision, detail, and scope of what can be analyzed spatially. This data isn’t just transforming — it’s fundamentally redefining the ways professionals and industries collect geospatial data for their particular application.
Let’s get down to the nitty gritty. Data from drones comes in multiple flavors: raw data such as JPGs, TIFFs, videos, and LiDAR point clouds. Since this is an introduction to the subject and LiDAR is advanced and expensive, I’m going to skip over it for now.
What Is the “Raw” Drone Data?
The raw data is the only thing you actually use your drone to collect. The rest of the process involves using various software products to process and analyze it. To put it simply, collecting raw data is the aviation part of the whole process.
Raw data comes in various formats including JPG, TIFF, and video. You collect it using your drone’s sensor, and the sensor you have determines which formats you’ll be working with.
Still Images (JPG, TIFF)
Still images are what you’d expect — pictures you take as you’re flying. However, when you’re mapping, you have to collect them in a very specific way. The gist of it: you need to point your camera downward and overlap the pictures both lengthwise and widthwise. Think of it as taking a large set of overlapping photos, like you might with any camera, but in a systematic grid pattern.
There are a lot of variables involved in collecting these images. Camera focus, white balance, shutter speed, and landscape lighting all play a role in collecting good data. Once you collect all those overlapping pictures, you can run them through photogrammetry software and create all the final products discussed below. The important part is that they’re sharp and have the correct overlap — or your end products will suffer.
This is important enough to get its own paragraph: still images are the backbone of mapping with your drone. Learn how to collect them well.
Videos
The videos you record are a lot more straightforward. Mostly you just need to be a good pilot to collect cinematic shots, which you can then slice and dice to suit your needs. This site focuses primarily on still images and what you can do with them — but aerial videos are a powerful tool in their own right and absolutely count as data.
What Are the Final Products?
The final products of the data you collect with your drone are where this whole thing gets interesting. They’re created using the process of photogrammetry.
Photogrammetry is a complicated mathematical science, but you don’t need to know the math — the software handles it. What you need to know is the software. As Wolf and Dewitt (2000) and McGlone (2004) defined it:
Photogrammetry is the art, science, and technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through processes of recording, measuring, and interpreting photographic images and patterns of recorded radiant electromagnetic energy and other phenomena.
So what end products can you expect? The first is obvious: videos — those don’t need any special processing beyond editing. The rest are trickier but much cooler. Run your raw imagery through photogrammetry software and you can produce orthophotos, elevation models, and 3D products such as point clouds and textured meshes.
Orthophotos
Orthophotos are stitched images that have been orthorectified — a process that removes image distortions caused by sensor tilt and topographic relief. Basically, you’re creating a Google Maps-style image with insanely good resolution. I’ve seen resolution get down to under 1 cm/pixel. However, remember that with great resolution comes smaller collection areas — you can typically only map 20–100 acres per flight.
Elevation Models
Elevation models are raster datasets that assign each pixel an elevation value representing that point in space.
One important legal note: only licensed surveyors can represent their elevation models as true and accurate. If you’re not a licensed surveyor, do not guarantee your products as such. At most, you can describe your data as for visual purposes or rough estimation only.
With that out of the way — what can you actually do with an elevation model? You can visualize elevation across an entire project area, generate contour maps for drainage and slope calculations, and create hillshades that provide a compelling visual representation of the terrain.
3D Products: Point Clouds and Textured Mesh
The 3D products can be some of the coolest results of your entire data collection workflow.
A point cloud is the reconstruction of all your collected data represented as millions of individual points — think of them as pixels on a 3D plane. Point clouds are one of the greatest outputs of photogrammetry. They’re excellent for measurements, visualizing spatial relationships, and creating 3D models of an area of interest.
A 3D mesh is a derivative of the point cloud. As the name implies, it meshes the point cloud together by connecting points and filling in surfaces — creating a continuous 3D visual without the gaps between points. A textured mesh can be a stunning-looking product, but it’s more useful as a visual deliverable than for precise measurement. In most cases, the point cloud is both a more accurate representation of the ground and the better choice for analysis.
What’s Next?
This is a great introduction to the drone mapping ecosystem — but it opens a lot of doors. Next up: photogrammetry software, data collection methodology, and many more topics. But above all, remember that we are professional pilots. Make sure that while you’re collecting data, you’re conducting yourself as one.
Raw data examples courtesy of DroneMapper.