- Technical Topics
The latest drone research cases and survey results are published. We aim to capture the needs of the times and introduce new technologies to provide surveying technology that is one step ahead.
Spatial Information Department
Tadashi Hasegawa
Joined in April 2015
In recent years, drone technology has rapidly spread to the world of surveying. Our company has also introduced drones to various sites, expanding the scope of our work. Currently, we use Structure from Motion (SFM) to analyze multiple drone-captured images from different perspectives and incorporate the surveyed coordinates to measure actual distances, such as height, width, and depth. With the introduction of drones and the latest analytical software, we can obtain an astonishing amount of information that was previously impossible to measure using surveying methods. Furthermore, we can create three-dimensional samples using 3D software. We have utilized these technologies to measure radiation levels in forests in our local town of Tomioka and in Futaba County. Drones not only measure radiation levels in dangerous areas where humans cannot enter and in high-dose areas, but also use lasers to measure individual trees and estimate timber volume, thereby assessing the value of the entire forest. While they cannot capture all forest information, they provide a much more efficient and accurate measurement than manually traversing mountains and forests. Thermal cameras are also expected to be effective in conducting population surveys of birds and animals, such as deer, as a measure against bird and animal damage.
Surveys and research using drones will become increasingly common in the future. We aim to further improve our technology and strive to play an important role in forest maintenance and decontamination. A paper on joint research between our company and Nihon University's College of Engineering, presented at an academic conference of the Remote Sensing Society of Japan, has been published in an official journal. Please take a look at the paper, which describes the effectiveness of using drones to measure radiation levels in the air and using thermal cameras to survey deer populations as a measure against bird and animal damage.
| 2018/07 | Remote Sensing Society of Japan Journal of the Remote Sensing Society of Japan, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2018 Initiatives for utilizing UAVs in recovery and reconstruction after the Great East Japan Earthquake |
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| 2018/11 | Remote Sensing Society of Japan 65th Academic Conference Accuracy verification of RedEdge-M for land cover classification analysis / Evaluation of the usefulness of drone thermal images with super-resolution processing applied for machine learning to extract individual deer |
| 2018/03 | FY2018 Japan Society of Civil Engineers Tohoku Branch Technical Research Presentation Continuous observation of land surface temperature in a small bare watershed using a UAV |
| 2019/11 | Remote Sensing Society of Japan 67th Academic Conference Improving the accuracy of spatial dose mapping using UAV sensing with consideration of land cover classification / Evaluating the usefulness of drone thermal images for estimating deer populations in large-scale marshes in comparison with light census surveys |
| 2019/09 | Proceedings of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers G (Environment) Continuous observation of surface temperature and comparison of radiation and soil moisture using UAV in a small bare watershed |
