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MAPPING

Create your own web-accessible proprietary maps: 10x better resolution than public satellite imagery, and for your precise timeframe.

HOW IT WORKS

WHAT IS HIGH-RESOLUTION MAPPING ?

A "map" is a graphic symbolic representation of a system or surface. Thanks to modern photogrammetry capabilities, data storage, and cloud hosting capabilities, satellite imagery of the earth's surface has been freely available to the public for decades. This free public map imagery faces certain limitations however, such as limited resolution and long update cycles. High-budget projects that require more recent data, higher resolution, and control over data integrity and security, have resorted to use of low-altitude aircraft to produce higher quality proprietary maps. In the past decade, rapid advances in unmanned aircraft technology have proven the ability to reduce the cost for building such proprietary maps. Tenbo Air uses unmanned aircraft to map and survey thousands of acres at fractions of the cost of manned aircraft.

PROJECT PLANNING

Digitally mapping and surveying a 20-acre residential property versus 20,000-acres of parish utilities, and the use-cases for both maps likely have very different resolution and survey requirements. The process of building a high-quality map starts with understanding the area extent and variability within that extent, and gaining a high respect for resolution and survey requirements. When you engage Tenbo Air on a high-resolution mapping project, we will first have a detailed requirements gathering discussion to intimately understand the area of interest and your end use-cases. These preliminary discussions will impact what follows: data acquisition efforts in the field, and finally the building and refining of the digital map product itself.

DATA ACQUISITION: PHOTOGRAMMETRY

The maps we produce are high-resolution scans of what exists in the real world. For the majority of our clients' cases, our goal is to produce a highly accurate and realistic digital representation of the area of interest given the project budget and available technology. Our process combines a data-collection and processing science called Photogrammetry, and can incorporate ground-based survey control as well as third-party survey data as needed. In accordance with requirements set in the project planning stages, our field engineers deploy to the area of interest and can collect low-altitude high-resolution imagery for thousands of acres in a single day using unmanned aircraft. In addition to aerial image collection, our field engineers will typically collect precise distance measurements and survey-grade GPS coordinates all over the area extent.

PROCESSING AND ANALYTICS

After data has been thoroughly reviewed in the field for completeness and quality, the data is handed over to the Tenbo Air analytics team for additional review and processing. The photogrammetry and survey data is loaded into local and cloud-based photogrammetry engines, which tackle the arduous and time-consuming tasks of stitching individual images together and building a high-resolution orthomosaic map of the area extent. An orthomosaic is essentially one large-scale high-resolution photo derivative of numerous small-scale high-resolution photos. Trained analysts monitor the progress of the orthomosaic map build, and may process various map versions covering different extents and at different resolutions. Additional data such as known distances on the ground, survey-grade GPS coordinates, and third-party survey datasets can then be integrated with the photogrammetry data to further constrain the map and optimize accuracy. Analysts can then proceed to build derivative datasets such as contour maps, elevation models, and multi-layer geo-databases hosted in the cloud for optimized viewing.

CLOUD-HOSTING AND DELIVERY

Once our analytical efforts have been exhausted given the known requirements , the high-resolution map and derivative datasets are delivered to the project stakeholders and subject matter experts for review. Datasets may be delivered in hard copy for local viewing, as large-scale paper prints, as well as via secure web-applications such as ESRI's ArcGIS Online. Understanding of the project environment, end use-cases, and accuracy requirements frequently evolve over the project lifetime, so we aim to deliver assets ahead of the original schedule to allow for a sufficient review period and if necessary, a re-analysis of the data and revisions to the mapping outputs.

MAPPING IN ACTION

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