[GH85Carrera]

Good Morning all. Hey Jim, hopefully you house did not take a trip to the marina.

My greedy mean boss made me work late last night. Well actually I made my poor computer work on a project that took it 8 hours to complete late in the night. I was in bed asleep. The CPU runs at 100% most of the time. The video card is banging away for a lot of it. The good new is it did what it is supposed to do. So this morning I get to clean up the image.
The project is in a heavily wooded area. Lots of houses with trees everywhere. The leaves are off the trees so we can sorta see the ground in most areas. The image the computer puts together is a mosaic of several hundred images. Then it builds a 3D model of the ground and rectifies all the images into a Orthophoto. That is a fancy name for a photo that has all the structures and even the terrain corrected to show the elevation changes. Mostly that means the building all stand straight up. It is impossible to have a photo of every building from directly above. Many of the buildings are at the side of the image and the camera sees the all four sides of the building from all the image overlap. We fly back and forth like mowing the lawn in the sky. The sidelap and forward overlap allow us to image all sides of a structure. It then builds a model and moves the pixels around to make the building stand straight up. That all works great if we have a clear photo of each building. When they are partially obscured by trees the computer blends tree and building and can make some strange looking buildings. Then I get to go in and tell it to ignore this but use this. Kinda tedious but it is cool to see it all come together. In the end we have an image and a 3D terrain model. We can then remove every object, trees and structures to show just the ground. Then we can show the elevations and show each foot of elevation change. We have a bunch of ground targets that the surveyor put down. We give him (well we sell him) the data. He can then double check any elevation point and verify we are accurate. He has to put his stamp on it. He is the surveyor. We just collect the points. He could do it all from the ground. It would take months. We do it in short order.