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Investigating the geomorphological potential of freely available and accessible structure-from-motion photogrammetry using a smartphone

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-08-17, 13:32 authored by Natan Micheletti, Jim Chandler, Stuart N. Lane
We test the acquisition of high-resolution topographic and terrain data using hand-held smartphone technology, where the acquired images can be processed using technology freely available to the research community. This is achieved by evaluating the quality of digital terrain models (DTM) of a river bank and an Alpine alluvial fan generated with a fully automated, free-to-use, structure-from-motion package and a smartphone integrated camera (5 megapixels) with terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data used to provide a benchmark. To evaluate this approach a 16.2-megapixel digital camera and an established, commercial, close-range and semi-automated software are also employed, and the product of the four combinations of the two types of cameras and software are compared. Results for the river bank survey demonstrate that centimetre-precision DTMs can be achieved at close range (10 m or less), using a smartphone camera and a fully automated package. Results improve to sub-centimetre precision with either higher-resolution images or by applying specific post-processing techniques to the smartphone DTMs. Application to an entire Alpine alluvial fan system shows the degradation of precision scales linearly with image scale, but that (i) the expected level of precision remains and (ii) difficulties in separating vegetation and sediment cover within the results are similar to those typically found when using other photo-based techniques and laser scanning systems.

Funding

This study was partially funded by the Herbette Foundation of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and by the Swiss Geomorphological Society (www.geomorphology.ch).

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

EARTH SURFACE PROCESSES AND LANDFORMS

Volume

40

Issue

4

Pages

473 - 486 (14)

Citation

MICHELETTI, N., CHANDLER, J.H. and LANE, S.N., 2015. Investigating the geomorphological potential of freely available and accessible structure-from-motion photogrammetry using a smartphone. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 40 (4), pp. 473 - 486.

Publisher

© John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: MICHELETTI, N., CHANDLER, J.H. and LANE, S.N., 2015. Investigating the geomorphological potential of freely available and accessible structure-from-motion photogrammetry using a smartphone. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 40 (4), pp. 473 - 486, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/esp.3648. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

ISSN

0197-9337

Language

  • en