While on vacation in Europe this past May and June, I capped the end of the trip with a stop at the ISPRS Geospatial Week at the University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands. On that vacation trip I spent two weeks in the Netherlands, visiting friends and meeting a few archaeologists with my partner. I then went to Napoli for a week to meet my partners parents and see where he grew up, and then went back to the Netherlands for the conference.

I attended the conference for the UAV and Indoor Mapping sessions, and to get to meet others from around the world and how they use UAVs. There were so many great sessions, but my favorite was the keynote by Avideh Zakhor of UC Berkley and her own company, IndoorReality.com. The indoor mapping, research, and platform she has worked on are astounding, and I can’t wait for the company to produce a product so we can implement it at my work.

I also got to talk to a bunch of others who fly UAVs and utilize photogrammetry, and there was a great discussion in the hallways about negating the effects of rolling shutter with consumer cameras. We also then talked about the just released plans for a Europe wide UAV license, much like the Part 107 license from the FAA in the United States.

The most visually stunning thing vendor at the event was IGI Systems, they had a 3D dual monitor stereoscopic viewer set up with data made from their data collection equipment. The stereoscopic viewer is shown in the photos above. I was also excited to learn about their railway LiDAR solution, and their Urban Mapper. The Urban Mapper takes five photos at once, one nadir photo, and four oblique photos, much like Leica’s City Mapper. The nadir and oblique configuration and its ability to be implemented in photogrammetry applications gives weight to my idea that a UAV should include five cameras in the same sort of configuration. I could reduce the time it takes to map a site if I had a five or three camera set up with a single nadir and pairs of oblique imagers.