Title: Course Description and Information
Course: Photogrammetry applied to drone image acquisition

The purpose of this course is to provide the participants with the knowledge necessary related to the advanced geospatial data processing of drone images and product generation. In this course, the basic concepts of photogrammetry and the three main workflows of photogrammetry (image orientation, point cloud and meshes generation, and orthophoto generation) using innovative techniques will be explained and applied on drone images using the commercial software Pix4D. The students will gain hand-on experience using the software by processing two different drone data sets.

Image orientation process results in a mathematical solution that relates the image space with the object space, so 3D information regarding the absolute or relative position of any object from an image sequence can be extracted.  Through the image orientation procedure, point cloud data set, meshes, Digital Terrain Models (DTM) and Digital Surface Models (DSM) are produced. The known image orientation parameters and the available DTM and/or DSM are prerequisites for the generation of orthophoto. Orthophotos are geometrically corrected images. The point cloud data set, DTM and DSM are also standard geospatial products that can be used for many other applications. The generated products can be exported to be used in open and free GIS and RS software tools.

The table below shows the overall course curriculum. Total course duration is 40 hrs, guidance by the lecturer will be for 6 weeks as from the start of the course. This entails that an average weekly effort of about 6 to 7 hours is expected to conduct the course.

By the end of the course, if all assignments are provided and well evaluated, a certificate of attendance will be provided.

Table 1: Course Curriculum

Main topic | Sub topic(s) | Type of study material | Study load (hours)
Course description | Overall course guide | Document | 0.5
Lesson 1: Introduction to the course and Photogrammetry
Intro to Topic:

  - What is Photogrammetry?
  - Image geometry
  - Stereoscopy: seeing and measuring 3d using 2d images
e.g. pdf

Document

Exercises and links to www
4.5
Lesson 2: Image Orientation- part1
Sub-Topic:

  - Principles and definitions of Photogrammetry
  - Main steps of the photogrammetric workflow
  - Image orientation:
  - Interior orientation
  - Exterior orientation
  - Relative orientation
  - Absolute orientation
e.g. pdf

Document

Exercises and links to www
14
Lesson 3: Point cloud generation
  - Definition of point cloud and properties
  - Image Matching Algorithms
  - Quality control
e.g. pdf

Document

Exercises and links to www
7
Lesson 4: Orthophoto generation
  - Geometry of the image
  - Image distortions
  - Correction of image distortions
  - Errors of orthorectification
  - Quality assessment/control
e.g. pdf

Document

Exercises and links to www
7
Lesson 5: Final assignment | Assignment using sample data collected over the Gulele Botanical garden in Addis Ababa. | Assignment description | 7

Prerequisites

To conduct the course, the following prerequisites are expected from the participants:

- Working knowledge of English;
- Proficiency using computers and ability to install software tools used during the course;
- Online access and familiar to use the EENSAT Education portal, upload of assignments;
- You have followed the Practical guide for the EENSAT course on drones.
- You have knowledge related to the basic concepts regarding  Earth Observation (EO) sensors and 2D geometric image transformations.
- You have knowledge related to elementary mathematics and statistics
- You have the knowledge related the characteristics of digital images

The course is set-up in such a way that there is no need to be online all the time. You can download the documents, exercise descriptions, software tools used as well as the data-sets, the study of the materials and to conduct the assignments can be done off-line. For upload of your results you should be online again. For eventual questions, you can also use the email address provided of the lecturer.

In order to ensure successful completion, please adhere to the overall course schedule as indicated in the final chapter of this course guide.

Overall course schedule

As from the start of course please take into consideration the expected progress for the duration of the course, to ensure successful completion. Please plan your time schedule over the next 6 weeks in such a way that you can adhere to this proposed schedule.

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6
Study course guide and  lesson 1 and submit assignment 1. | Study lesson 2 and start working on assignment 2 | Continue studying lesson 2 and submit assignment 2 | Study lesson 3 and submit assignment 3 | Study lesson 4 and submit assignment 4 | Work and submit the final assignment 5

Note: Each block is considered to be approx. 7 hours

During and after completion of the course the exercise results (total of 5 assignments, for lessons 1-5) should be uploaded into the LMS.