The AUT Hawk Team has just acquired the Pix4UAV software package.  This elegant software is specifically designed for use with small UAVs and enables the stitching together of image sets to produce orthomosaics and 3-D images that can be manipulated to examine terrain surfaces.

For such a complex piece of software, it is surprisingly easy to run.

Over the last few days, a Masters research student has been processing images collected in NZD 522.  Barbara and Prof John B have also worked with the software.

There have, of course, been a few teething problems.  The format of the images collected by our Sony NEX5-N is not compatible with Pix4UAV and the photo log from the autopilot needs to be in the form of a space-delimited text file.  However, we have produced a couple of mosaics with some success.  Further tuning of our inputs is required before we can produce the sort of 3-D images shown in a previous post on the potential of our Hawk UAS.