Sme

High Resolution Aerial Photography

Small unmanned aerial vehicles or UAV technology offer a unique opportunity to acquire imagery at a very high resolution and at a very low cost. This new technology can be a useful tool and valuable in numerous areas:

Building insurance

Roof inspections on buildings of all sizes

Property damage assessment

Pine beetle inspections and monitoring

Timber stand typing and dilineation

Tree seedling survival counts

Wading bird surveys

Landscape architecture

Post-herbicide spray inspection

Construction progress monitoring

Pre-Construction site surveys

One of the benefits of this technology is imagery at high resolutions is affordable for anyone. Not only is it very cost effective to collect and process this high-resolution imagery, it is repeatable allowing for regular monitoring of sites throughout the year. This technology also reduces the cost of existing methods performing some tasks while increasing the quality of information obtained. Not only can a better product be produced, it can be done faster and cheaper than traditional methods and in some cases where it was not even possible before this technology. We have the ability to collect imagery with a resolution of 1 cm or less per pixel and incorporate this imagery into a GIS project, georectifying it and using it for planning, monitoring, or decision making purposes. Further, we can provide user-friendly, georectified KMZ file that can be opened directly in GoogleEarth; you do not need a complicated GIS program to view your imagery.

Below you can see imagery of approximately the same area in two photographs. The one on the left is Google Earth imagery at a resolution of 1,114 pixels by 848 pixels. The same area on the right is much higher resolution imagery at a resolution of 7,613 pixels by 6,785 pixels. Another comparison can be seen is a 1,114 x 848 pixel-sized area of the high resolution imagery. Each pixel represents a much smaller area.
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