Synopsis - Drones in research #2 - From pixels to point clouds - Using drones, game engines and virtual reality
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Brown, Tim
From pixels to point clouds - Using drones, game engines and virtual reality to model and map the National Arboretum in Canberra
 I'm Tim Brown. I'm the director of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility at ANU. We were working on a time series drone program out at the National Arboretum in Canberra. The goal of the program is to capture three-dimensional point clouds of the arboretum growing so we can build a three-dimensional model on the computer and put online and in virtual reality of the arboretum's forest growing. And drone technology is really amazing because it lets us do in about a morning, so 20 minutes of drone flying and three hours of processing, lets us get height and size data of every tree in a forest, about 2,000 trees, that would have taken months to capture by hand in the past. To work with this complex data, we've developed something called forest utils, which takes a point cloud generated from three-dimensional reconstruction software using the drone flight images and gives us tree height, top-down area, the location of every tree, the RGB color of the tree, and a point cloud, which is a measure of the diffuse area of the tree. It also gives us a CSV of the tree data that we can then put in Google Maps online or in Google Earth. These sorts of tools have really expanded the range of what you can do in terms of monitoring and mapping of forests and research sites using drones.
 I'm Tim Brown. I'm the director of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility at ANU.  We were working on a time series drone program out at the National Arboretum in Canberra.  The goal of the program is to capture three-dimensional point clouds of the arboretum growing  so we can build a three-dimensional model on the computer and put online  and in virtual reality of the arboretum's forest growing.  And drone technology is really amazing because it lets us do in about a morning,  so 20 minutes of drone flying and three hours of processing,  lets us get height and size data of every tree in a forest, about 2,000 trees,  that would have taken months to capture by hand in the past.  To work with this complex data, we've developed something called forest utils,  which takes a point cloud generated from three-dimensional reconstruction software  using the drone flight images and gives us tree height, top-down area, the location of every tree,  the RGB color of the tree, and a point cloud, which is a measure of the diffuse area of the tree.  It also gives us a CSV of the tree data that we can then put in Google Maps online or in Google Earth.  These sorts of tools have really expanded the range of what you can do in terms of monitoring  and mapping of forests and research sites using drones.
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