• T E C H N O LO GY:
CASE STUDY
ADVANCED MAPPING WITH RECON AND FERNTECH Ferntech How are New Zealanders making the most of the latest mapping technology to change the surveying industry? We spoke to Jeremy Neilson and Ben Cook at advanced geospatial and survey specialists Recon to find out.
Jeremy, tell us about how Recon
them whether they use CAD, GIS or
started. What problems were you
other specialist software.
looking to solve? Jeremy: We recognised a need for mapping those “hard to reach” places, so we set about using drones, manned-helicopters and other mass data collection methods in situations where traditional surveying techniques wouldn’t be practical or cost-effective. Our focus is on quality, accuracy and the usability of the final deliverables that we supply to our clients. One problem we aimed to solve was that clients couldn’t utilise mass data themselves, such as large pointclouds and textured mesh models. We have refining and modelling techniques in place to ensure clients can receive and quickly get to work using the data we supply
What lead Recon to use drone LiDAR as opposed to photogrammetry? Ben: The reason Recon made the decision to use drone LiDAR was because we knew photogrammetry alone would never provide the desired results under vegetation. Operating our own system would separate us from the competition. We were working on a rail project at the time and the use of drone LiDAR meant that we could map the landscape underneath vegetated areas that would be key for planning an upgrade project. The advantage of drone LiDAR over traditional aerial LiDAR systems is that we can get a high density of points over small to
SURVEYING+SPATIAL
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