Metric Camera

[smctavish]

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Hi,

I'm fairly new to this, but I am in need of a light weight camera for use on an unmanned aerial plane for doing mapping. The camera needs to be rugged and under 600 grams. The most important feature is that it can be calibrated to become a metric camera. The lens and internal parameters need to stable in order to rely on the calibration files. Does anyone know if Leica has a suitable camera for this application and is small enough for us? Thanks.

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[Bob Ross]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to this, but I am in need of a light weight camera for use on an unmanned aerial plane for doing mapping. The camera needs to be rugged and under 600 grams. The most important feature is that it can be calibrated to become a metric camera. The lens and internal parameters need to stable in order to rely on the calibration files. Does anyone know if Leica has a suitable camera for this application and is small enough for us? Thanks.

That is an interesting situation. In theory, if you knew the altitude/subject distance, the actual focal length and the sensor dimensions, you could establish the dimensions of the field of view captured and from that, the dimensions of objects within the frame. The EXIF information would give the focal length, your telemitry might give you the altitude and the camera specs would give you the sensor dimensions. For example a full 35mm frame sensor with a diagonal of 43.5mm and a lens of 43.5mm would give you a captured field of view diagonal equal to the altitude. At a fixed altitude, variations in land elevation would skew the data, so some sort of radar altimeter would be in order. Matching the telemetry to the image time would be necessary, too. Other considerations would be how much resolution do you need, how big an area needs to be captured and what remote controls of the camera do you want. Other nice things that you might want would be some form of image stabilization and the ability to use a fixed focal length lens, that could manually focused at infinity, at a fixed aperture.

Bob