The next challenge is smart digitization

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We all know that unlike a classic topographic survey, a drone returns millions of points, many of which are useless and "wrong" like trees, cars, things etc etc...

The automatic classification of points almost always does not lead to good results and therefore the only solution is, still, to manually trace the elements of interest and export them to a CAD file.

This is a "stupid", long and boring operation.

What I'd like would be a system to automatically extract the fundamental geometries of the ground, eliminating the excessive amount of information of a point cloud and schematizing the result to simple geometries (the ones I get by manually tracing) for the next steps of the design.

Is there something like this or is it just a dream ?
 
I hear ya! I digitize many of the projects I fly. And you are right. It gets very mundane after a while.

Understanding what can (and can't) be accurately digitized from the orthomosaic requires a serious understanding of the dynamics of an aerial ortho. Trying to explain that to clients is often difficult, and there is so much to it, that it is hard to cover it all.

I do a lot of roadways. Take traffic signal heads for instance. A client may see a signal head it the orthomosaic, but trying to explain to them, that since it is suspended, the position they see is probably not it's actual location. That is one reason that I try to provide and explain the use of a 3D model. They can extract the true location of the signal head from the model. Likewise for building corners, powerpoles, powerlines, signs, etc.

But back to your question, I think that many conventional aerial companies use a "feature extraction" software that creates linework from the aerial. I have recently seen that Aerotas is offering linework from your processed project. But I think this is still done by hand. Which actually may be good, as I'm not sure I totally trust a program to do it correctly.

Let's hope it's not a dream, because it I'd gladly try something that reduced the mind-numbing process of digitizing for hours on end.
 
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But back to your question, I think that many conventional aerial companies use a "feature extraction" software that creates linework from the aerial

Me too.

I tried a series of software (with crazy prices) that promise to automatically extract the fundamental breaklines.

They simply don't work. The final result is very poor.
 

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