Drone imagery: data processing tools

This resource was originally published on the CartoBlog in 2018 by CartONG. It was transferred to the IM Resource Portal in May 2021. The CartoBlog will be decommissioned in early 2022.

CartONG is releasing a comparison between 3 UAV post-treatment software. After a previous project in 2016 with FSD and UAViator, CartONG has gained more experiences in post-treatment images. UNHCR being interested by this technology, CartONG worked on this software comparison.

For this first comparison, the choice was made to focus on 3 commercial tools. In the future, CartONG intends to release a similar comparison for open-source software.

The three software were selected for the following reasons: CartONG already used Pix4D for a mission with partner, Drone2Map is the ESRI solution and we daily work with their other products for one of our main partner and finally, AgiSoft was a literature recommendation we wanted to try.

The comparison is built around the analysis of the ergonomics of the software, and the quality of the images produced: point cloud, orthomosaic and elevation model.

If you’d like to learn more about the original project between CartONG & FSD, please refer to the news article about our mission in Tajikistan.