Low-Cost Global Navigation Satellite System for Drone Photogrammetry Projects

This work is part of a thesis research at IRC. The subject is the follow up of the evolution of an earthen dike subjected to the swell, its close environment as well as its maintenance by doing several data collection missions in two years. One type of data retrieved so far is the imagery of the dike taken by drone. The goal is to determine the shape of the dike, to observe the vegetation cover and to estimate the shallow bathymetry near the dike. A low cost GNSS receiver is used to determine the ground control points coordinates using the corrections of Centipede Network stations in the area. The coordinates were obtained in RTK-fixed mode. Two kinds of GNSS antennas (multiband and dual band) were used to determine the GCP’s (Ground Control Points) and CP’s (Checkpoints), we compare the accuracy of the digital models generated with both GCP’s sets for two collections of images. The best results were obtained with the multiband GNSS antenna for the collection of images with higher overlap ratio.