CASE STUDY: Aerial Mapping
Scout Aerial combines state-of-the-art unmanned aircraft, powerful photogrammetry tools and experienced GIS professionals to deliver high volume asset mapping projects. This service is helping our clients in the infrastructure and construction industries to save on routine inspections, optimise maintenance schedules and keep a record of historical asset changes throughout the years.
CLIENT: Local Government Infrastructure Services (LGIS) / Moreton Bay Regional Council
LOCATION: Queensland, Australia
SERVICES: More than 26Km of seawalls mapped, more than 140 ground control points used for delivering horizontal/vertical accuracy of +/- 50mm (or better), point cloud object and vegetation removal on over 26 hectares of mapped land.
PROJECT SUMMARY:
Seawall inspections are laborious activities, requiring ground staff to cover considerable stretches of land, sometimes in dangerous or hard to access sites. To maximise the seawall exposure, this type of mapping is required to be done during low tides only, resulting in a very short window of three to five hours of work per day. This limitation drastically decreases the delivery speed of such projects when performed by ground staff.
Using RPAS, Scout Aerial could maximise the land coverage during low tides and capture thousands of high resolution images up to 4cm/pixel. These images we then processed by Scout Aerial’s GIS staff so as to deliver, for each extent of seawall mapped:
- Orthorectified survey quality imagery;
- Surface model (point cloud with objects and vegetation removed)
- Digital Terrain Models (DTMs);
- Identification of Seawall’s tops and toes;
- Slope profiles in key positions of the seawalls.
Several mapped areas were close to airfields and marine parks serving as base for migratory birds, adding extra complexity to this project. Thorough planning, comprehensive risk assessments and constant coordination with local manned air traffic and Department of Marine Parks were essential to ensure safety, compliance and minimum stress to the wild life.
