Done! WebODM is now available as a turn-key web application from https://webodm.net. It took only 7 years. But why did it take so long? Back in August 2016 when I started designing the ideas around what would be then called WebODM, I never had a doubt that 1) It should be a web application and 2) A SaaS/open-source model would help sustain it’s continued development. It’s only after the first iterations of the software came to completion that I realized […]
ODM 3.0, the leading open-source drone mapping engine, has been released! This release has focused on improving output quality, removing some legacy parameters and fixing long-standing issues with the software. You can check the change log to see what has been removed. If your scripts use legacy parameters, they will be ignored and you will get a warning. This follows our philosophy of “not breaking stuff”. It can be difficult to convey in words what I mean by “improving output […]
OpenDroneMap is now compatible with the Apple M1 (no, not with this arm). The community came together to fund this feat. Thanks to everyone that contributed! What was challenging about this? Apple M1 speaks a different language than Intel chips (the mainstream chips that most people’s computers have). This language is a dialect of ARM. Apple has added a piece of software to guarantee some compatibility with applications not specifically built for its new chip, but the compatibility layer fails […]
I’m proud to to announce that as of last week, our esteemed community member, long-time contributor and all-around champion of open source Saijin_Naib has become the first non-developer paid contributor to be sponsored by UAV4GEO. He’s no stranger to OpenDroneMap. He has been involved with the project for a long time and has demonstrated incredible enthusiasm across these years while helping people, rallying for fundraising rounds and advocating for a world with more free and open source software. UAV4GEO is […]
One of the cool things about open source software is that it has a tendency to eventually run everywhere. If you have the source code available and certain constraints allow it, with sufficient time a port can be made to different platforms. This is not always the case with proprietary software, where the vendor decides which platforms to support. In the beginning, ODM could only run on Ubuntu Linux. Later, we opted to leverage docker, which is an amazing (yet […]
Chapter 1. Ghosts If there’s something strange, in your multispectral dataset, who you gonna call? Well, the OpenDroneMap community obviously! Whenever ghosting occurs, the problem is related to band alignment. In multispectral datasets, sensors such as the Sentera 6x, take multiple pictures at once using different cameras, each capable of capturing a different part of the light spectrum. This enables us to have images for various bands such as red, green, blue and near infrared. The images however are not […]
Today we’re excited to announce a new major release of ODM! What have we been working on? Well a lot of things. The two most important ones are the ones we hope you won’t notice, because they don’t affect functionality, but have been part of necessary “infrastructure” updates to make sure that ODM continues to work in the future. Namely: If you’re using docker, these changes are (should be) transparent. If you’re running ODM natively, you will need to upgrade […]
As part of our mission to bring awesome drone software, we focus intensively on sustainability (a.k.a. how to pay for development, bug fixes, new features, hosting, etc. for the benefit of all). Open-source is a tricky type of software to fund. I will not cover the details, as other people have already done a great job of summarizing the problem. I have a keen interest in finding solutions to the open-source funding problem. In particular, how do you give more […]
With the help of several members of the community, today we have launched a simple tool to visually compare outputs processed with several drone mapping packages (including ODM, of course): https://opendronemap.github.io/UAVArena/ We are pleased with how far ODM has come over the years and hopefully this tool will continue to help track our progress, at least as a measure of “visual appeal” (up next, accuracy comparisons?).
WebODM 1.2.0 has been released today. This is a major release update that brings some shiny new features to the platform, most importantly a large effort to write a dynamic tiling system (powered in large part by rio-cogeo and rio-tiler, thank you Vincent Sarago for the great software!) They include: Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF support COGs are “regular GeoTIFF files, aimed at being hosted on a HTTP file server, with an internal organization that enables more efficient workflows on the cloud.”. […]