Reconstructing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) image footprints with PostGIS 3D

The rapid development of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS, also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs) as data collectors is revolutionizing remote data collection in all sectors. Barriers to wider adoption outside military sectors include regulatory frameworks preventing their flight in some nations, for example, the United States, and the lack of open-source implementations of post processing software. In the next four recipes, we'll attempt preliminary solutions to the latter of these two barriers.

For this recipe, we will be using the metadata from a UAV flight in Seneca County, Ohio, to map the coverage of the flight. More information about this flight, which was piloted by the Ohio Department of Transportation, can be found at http://www.13abc.com/story/22186538/o-dot-using-tiny-technology-on-big-projects.

The basic idea for this recipe is to estimate the field of view of the UAV camera, generate a 3D pyramid...