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

The rapid development of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (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, such as, 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, by the Ohio Department of Transportation to map the coverage of the flight. This is included in the code folder for this chapter.

The basic idea for this recipe is to estimate the field of view of the UAV camera, generate a 3D pyramid that represents that field of view, and use the flight ephemeris (bearing, pitch, and roll) to estimate...