I’m looking for thoughts/ideas on how to use WebODM to improve imagery geo-registration.
Here is the scenario:
Trying to develop a system for detection of wildfire hot spots using thermal sensing technology. Operationally the sensor is mounted in a manned aircraft. The best time for doing the thermal image capture is when the background temperatures are lowest so that the hot spots have greatest contrast with background temperatures. Thus, the usual time of the image capture flight is at or just before dawn. The sensor being used is a thermal line scanner … i.e. a “push-broom” sensor that captures strips of imagery from the time the sensor is turned on to the time it is turned off. The pixel width of the sensor is 640 pixels by however long the sensor is “on” capturing imagery. The sensor vendor provides software that does thermal calibration of the imagery and georegistration/ortho processing.
The issue is that the georegistration requirement is to be plus or minus 5 meters. Unfortunately in practice have found that after processing with the sensor vendor software the georegistration is about 15 meters off … so it needs some improvement.
Which is where WebODM would come into play. Would like to use WebODM to improve the georegistration by doing a block adjustment of the newly captured thermal imagery to match a reference image (e.g. Google Earth or ArcGIS Online etc). Since the ortho processing is already done there is no need to do any camera modeling … just need to take 2 or more flight lines (image strips) of image data and block adjust them to the reference imagery with the goal of matching the reference imagery within a pixel or so … in order to generate a seamless mosaic for further analysis.
Testing of WebODM to date has not been successful. It seems that WebODM has difficulty handling “push-broom” sensors and wants to do full on ortho processing (which is not needed). So, the question is … how to work with WebODM to accomplish this processing?
If needed, I have some sample imagery that could be shared (proprietary imagery that is not to be shared outside of this project) with you for testing purposes (and destroyed afterword).
Here is some background data that might be of interest:
Sensor: ITRES miniTABI 640 thermal sensor operated in continuous mode (i.e. as a push-broom)
Flight altitude: About 1,500 feet (500m) above ground level
Typical GSD of imagery: .5 to 1.25 meter
All thoughts on how to use WebODM to accomplish this project would be appreciated.