AERIAL SURVEY
High-precision aerial surveys by drone
Working with Studio Dryos, the landscape architecture practice Green Design® carries out drone-assisted surveys, offering a precise and detailed aerial photogrammetry service.
What an aerial drone survey can monitor
Using a drone and aerial survey techniques, the landscape practice Green Design® can produce:
- Detailed orthophotos
- Digital terrain models
- Agricultural land use
- Urban topography
- Forest management
- Road design
- River monitoring
- Quarry and mine analysis
- Archaeological sites
- Disaster management
This allows us to offer clients a landscape regeneration project that takes into account every variable of the terrain.
Aerial drone surveys: how we work
For aerial surveys, the landscape practice Green Design® uses a drone – a remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) – fitted with a calibrated 16-megapixel digital camera that captures images with a ground resolution of 5 cm/pixel.
The drone works on the principle of photogrammetry: it captures highly overlapping images from which the plan, the elevation of the ground and the volume of the objects on it can be determined. The images from the aerial survey are then processed with dedicated software that stitches the photographs into a georeferenced orthophoto and builds a digital surface model (DSM), a three-dimensional image of the area made of a point cloud with a density of 11 points per square metre (one point every 30 centimetres).
Filtering out everything above the ground (trees, buildings, etc.) produces the digital terrain model (DTM) with a 2.5 m grid, which contains all the information needed to develop a landscape design without further site visits.
The drones of the landscape architecture practice Green Design®
For aerial surveys, Studio Green Design® uses a fixed-wing gliding RPAS made by senseFly©, a leader in the field, which covers large survey areas and is optimised for mapping and topographic applications. The drone can carry a camera for RGB digital images or red, infrared, multispectral or thermal sensors, depending on the purpose of the survey.
