Technical Paper
Validating RealityCapture for Point cloud Creation Using sUAS Imagery
2024-04-09
2024-01-2477
Creating a 3-dimensional environment using imagery from small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS, or unmanned aerial vehicles -UAVs, or colloquially, drones) has grown in popularity recently in accident reconstruction. In this process, ground control points are placed at an accident scene and an sUAS is flown over an accident site and a series of overlapping, high resolution images are taken of the site. Those images and ground control points are then loaded onto a computer and processed using photogrammetric software to create a 3-dimensional point cloud or mesh of the site, which then can be used as a tool for recreating an accident scene. Many software packages have been created to perform these tasks, and in this paper, the authors examine RealityCapture, a newer photogrammetric software, to evaluate its accuracy for the use in accident reconstruction. It is the authors’ experience that RealityCapture may at times produce point clouds with less noise that other software packages.