Corridor Mapping the Salt River

We recently embarked on a challenging corridor mapping project along the Salt River, just outside of Phoenix, Arizona.  This section of the river is home to the apache trail in addition to several hydroelectric dams for SRP.  Areas like these would typically be completed using aerial lidar and would be relatively expensive.  We were able to map this area in less than an hour, and fully process the data into a point cloud in less than a day.  The vertical relief in this area is truly impressive compared with most areas that we have mapped.  Using a large number of oblique images, we were essentially able to map the vertical surfaces with the same pixel density as horizontal ones.

Some statistics:

  • Average Ground Sampling Distance (GSD):  2.82 in
  • Time for processing:  9.2 Hours
  • Number of images: 2500
  • Number of Points generated:  179,573,989