Evaluating the effectiveness of low cost UAV generated topography for geomorphic change detection

Abstract:

With the recent explosion in the use and availability of unmanned aerial vehicle platforms and development of easy to use structure from motion software, UAV based photogrammetry is increasingly being adopted to produce high resolution topography for the study of surface processes. UAV systems can vary substantially in price and complexity, but the tradeoffs between these and the quality of the resulting data are not well constrained. We look at one end of this spectrum and evaluate the effectiveness of a simple low cost UAV setup for obtaining high resolution topography in a challenging field setting. Our study site is the Daan River gorge in western Taiwan, a rapidly eroding bedrock gorge that we have monitored with terrestrial Lidar since 2009. The site presents challenges for the generation and analysis of high resolution topography, including vertical gorge walls, vegetation, wide variation in surface roughness, and a complicated 3D morphology. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the UAV-derived topography, we compare it with terrestrial Lidar data collected during the same survey period. Our UAV setup combines a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter with a 16 megapixel Canon Powershot camera for a total platform cost of less than $850. The quadcopter is flown manually, and the camera is programmed to take a photograph every 5 seconds, yielding 200-250 pictures per flight. We measured ground control points and targets for both the Lidar scans and the aerial surveys using a Leica RTK GPS with 1-2 cm accuracy. UAV derived point clouds were obtained using Agisoft Photoscan software. We conducted both Lidar and UAV surveys before and after a summer typhoon season, allowing us to evaluate the reliability of the UAV survey to detect geomorphic changes in the range of one to several meters. We find that this simple UAV setup can yield point clouds with an average accuracy on the order of 10 cm compared to the Lidar point clouds. Well-distributed and accurately located ground control points are critical, but we achieve good accuracy with even with relatively few ground control points (25) over a 150,000 sq m area. The large number of photographs taken during each flight also allows us to explore the reproducibility of the UAV-derived topography by generating point clouds from different subsets of photographs taken of the same area during a single survey.