A professor at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT-R) has developed an indigenous technological system for aerial survey of any area, a system which is much more cost- effective as compared to the contemporary remote sensing-based light Detection and Ranging technology (liDAR). In liDAR, an aeroplane is used to take the images of an area whereas a drone has been used for this purpose with drone-taken videos being embedded with an interactive (web) map through the newly developed system to demonstrate the aerial survey which includes place and time data on computer screen for the user, said Kamal Jain, the professor of the civil engineering department of the institute who invented the aerial survey system.
“As of now the aerial survey of big area or civil construction projects is mostly done with the help of liDAR technology, which requires a camera-mounted aircraft for acquiring the images of the projects in the air. However, aircraft needs a minimum (vertical) flying of 1,000 feet from the ground and for flying the aircraft permission is taken from certain aviation authorities.
Therefore, liDAR becomes a costly and tedious job for seeker of aerial survey. Hence we have developed a UAV-Video Geotagging system in this connection,” he said
Drone, called as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in technical jargon, is sent over a particular area, for instance a canal, to take video the images and simultaneously this video footage(s) is tagged with a web map, which enables the user to know accurate ‘geospatial’ information like latitude and longitude of each point of that canal (or any area) along with video capturing time as the cursor on the computer is moved by the user, Professor Jain said.
The inventor has taken the help of Google map for tagging their videos of many infrastructure projects. Recently, changing status of landslide affected road for Char Dham Yatra, cleaning of Ganga canal, army troop movement like tasks have been tested successfully on the system, Professor Jain claimed.
“According to an estimate, if user wants to monitor one kilometre stretch of a road, the liDAR technology costs around Rs 30,000 for an air plane are needed to take aerial videos. On the other hand, with the use of our developed system, the monitoring cost of that job hardly comes to Rs 5, 000,” he added