Democratizing photogrammetry: an accuracy perspective

ABSTRACT

Photogrammetry is experiencing an era of democratization mostly due to the popularity and availability of many commercial off-the-shelf devices, such as drones and smartphones. They are used as the most convenient and effective tools for high-resolution image acquisition for a wide range of applications in science, engineering, management, and cultural heritage. However, the quality, particularly the geometric accuracy, of the outcomes from such consumer sensors is still unclear. Furthermore, the expected quality under different control schemes has yet to be thoroughly investigated. This paper intends to answer those questions with a comprehensive comparative evaluation. Photogrammetry, in particular, structure from motion, has been used to reconstruct a 3D building model from smartphone and consumer drone images, as well as from professional drone images, all under various ground control schemes. Results from this study show that the positioning accuracy of smartphone images under direct geo-referencing is 165.4 cm, however, this could be improved to 43.3 cm and 14.5 cm when introducing aerial lidar data and total station surveys as ground control, respectively. Similar results are found for consumer drone images as well. For comparison, this study shows the use of the professional drone is able to achieve a positioning accuracy of 3.7 cm. Furthermore, we demonstrate that through the combined use of drone and smartphone images we are able to obtain full coverage of the entire target with a 2.3 cm positioning accuracy. Our study concludes that smartphone images can achieve an accuracy equivalent to consumer drone images and can be used as the primary data source for building facade data collection.

KEYWORDS:

• Drone
• smartphone
• photogrammetry
• Structure from Motion (SfM)
• aero triangulation
• point clouds

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data used in this study is currently not available for public use.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jie Shan

Jie Shan conceptualization, supervision, fieldwork, analysis, writing.

Zhixin Li

Zhixin Li field surveying, fieldwork, data curation, photogrammetric experiments, writing.

Damon Lercel

Damon Lercel drone data acquisition, writing.

Kevan Tissue

Kevan Tissue filed surveing and computation, smartphone image acquisition and curation, writing.

Joseph Hupy

Joseph Hupy drone data acquistion, writing.

Joshua Carpenter

Joshua Carpenter field surveying, writing.