UAVs for the Environmental Sciences Methods and Applications

Description

UAVs are used in a vast field of applications in environmental sciences due to their flexible, easy and low-cost data acquisition procedures when contrasted to other remote sensing devices. This book gives an overview of the usage of UAVs in environmental sciences covering technical basics, data acquisition with different sensors, data processing schemes and illustrating various examples of application. Overall, this book addresses the entire processing chain of using UAVs to answer environmental questions. Cover Copyright Table of Contents Preface 1 Basics 1.1 Historical developments of UAV use in environmental sciences 1.2 Comparing UAV to other remote sensing techniques 1.3 Technical basics of UAVs 1.4 Legal considerations of UAV flights 1.5 Guidelines for flight operations 2 Data Acquisition 2.1 Georeferencing UAV measurements 2.2 Principles of image-based 3D reconstruction 2.3 Uncertainty in image-based 3D reconstruction 2.4 Thermal-infrared imaging 2.5 Multi- and hyperspectral imaging 2.6 UAV laser scanning 2.7 Other UAV sensors 3. Data Analysis 3.1 Data formats 3.2 Analysis of imagery – automatic extraction of semantic information 3.3 Image sequence processing 3.4 Digital Elevation Models and their topographic derivatives 3.5 Deformation measurements based on point clouds 4. Applications 4.1 UAVs in geology 4.2 UAVs in geomorphology 4.3 UAVs in hydrology 4.4 UAVs in forestry 4.5 UAVs in cryosphere research 4.6 UAVs in Volcanology 4.7 UAVs in agriculture 4.8 UAVs in conservation research Abbreviations References Backcover