Orthomosaic Maps from Drone Surveys

An orthomosaic is a single aerial image of a site, stitched from hundreds or thousands of overlapping drone photos and corrected so that every pixel sits in its true map position. Unlike an ordinary aerial photo, an orthomosaic has a uniform scale, so distances and areas can be measured directly from it.

Darling Geomatics flies the site with survey-grade drones and ties the imagery to ground control, so the orthomosaic lines up with your survey, CAD drawings and GIS layers.

What you receive

• A georeferenced orthomosaic in your project coordinate system
• GeoTIFF and other common raster formats for CAD and GIS
• Tiled versions for fast viewing on large sites
• Optional matching products from the same flight: point cloud, digital terrain model and contours

Where orthomosaics are used

• Site planning and design backgrounds
• Construction progress tracking and documentation
• Mine and stockpile planning
• Land development and due diligence
• Record imagery of a site at a point in time

How we produce an orthomosaic

We plan the flight for the detail you need, with enough overlap between photos for the software to match every part of the site. Ground control points and checkpoints are surveyed on the ground; the control fixes the orthomosaic to your coordinate system and the checkpoints show how well it fits. The images are then processed into a surface model and the photos are projected onto it, removing the lean of buildings and terrain so the result is a true map view.

Large sites can be captured in a single visit, and repeat flights over the same control give orthomosaics that line up from one month to the next, which makes them ideal for tracking construction progress or changes on a mine site.