Untitled - Eric Cheng

Articles

A couple days ago, some fisherman drove their boat onto the reef in Honolulu. I flew it today with a DJI Phantom 3 to take some aerial images and to try to generate a 3D model of the boat. The aerial images are informative, and could be used to tell whether the boat is sitting on live coral or not. 

The 3D model, however, did not process successfully, presumably because there is a giant area of glare from the sun from certain angles; as a result, Pix4D was unable to match enough points. Doing 3D models of things in water is difficult, and the resulting model is only of one half of the boat. DroneDeploy’s Map Engine actually did a fairly good job, despite the problems with the glare. Here is the 3D model generated by DroneDeploy:

1446259728_OPENPIPELINE
by DroneDeploy
on Sketchfab