From crashing kites and Frankenmodels to efficient large-scale UAV acquisitions and beautiful shared 3D models (2018 GSA talk)

I was invited to give a presentation in a session at the Fall 2018 Geological Society of America session T60. Revolutions in Remote Sensing: Applications of UAVs to Field Mapping and Surface Analytics (organized by Dylan Blumentritt--Winona State University and Toby Dogwiler--Missouri State University). I decided to make a my presentation a bit of a reflection of how my own obsession with low altitude imaging had evolved and how far we had come. After all, I started in college working in the Fairchild Aerial Photography Collection when it was at Whittier College. So, I came up with a talk with the hopefully entertaining title of FROM CRASHING KITES AND FRANKENMODELS TO EFFICIENT LARGE-SCALE UAV ACQUISITIONS AND BEAUTIFUL SHARED 3D MODELS. I am putting links to the talks on line in case they might be useful: PPT and PDF.

The presentation shows a couple of maybe interesting things:

1. It shows a pretty 3D point cloud (video above) from our Photogrammetric model of the Tecolote Volcano, Sonora, Mexico hosted at https://opentopography.org/.
2. It spends some time talking about and making the case for the OpenTopography Community Dataspace.
3. As part of the OpenTopography Community Dataspace discussion, I (with slides and ideas from Chris Crosby) talked about standardizing metadata for these long tail data. See for example the different styles of metadata documents ("Survey Report"): for example Almaty range front fault, Koram site or Clear Creek, Idaho post-fire debris flow erosion--note the ones I uploaded are not great examples :).
4. Of course, one of the really nice things that the OpenTopography Community Dataspace publishing of one's data allows is to mint a DOI. That DOI allows then for a data citation. I have added a new part of my CV that has a section on data publication. Here is an example citation style:
   Arrowsmith, J R., DiMaggio, E. N., Garello, G. I., Villmoare, B. and LediGeraru Research Project (2018): Photogrammetric model of a portion of the LeeAdoyta Basin, Afar, Ethiopia (point cloud [122M points], orthophoto [2cm/pix], and DEM [25 cm/pix]). Distributed by OpenTopography. AccessedOctober 23, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5069/G95X271W.

The conclusions are useful to highlight as well:

• We are part of a revolution in 3 and 4 D data collection and analysis
• Additional needs for the community include
• Optimized data acquisition strategies
• Low cost and high performance computation of point clouds and models
• Efficient and accurate georeferencing
• High quality differencing for change detection
• Bring the tools and data into the (outdoor) classroom; need more curriculum (c.f. GETSI - GEodesy Tools for Societal Issues (UNAVCO) at https://serc.carleton.edu/getsi/)
• OpenTopography Community Dataspace
• Great opportunity to expand the impact of emerging topography through improved access
• Services and existing community of users
• Community engagement & best practices
• Please join us and start sharing your models and ideas for how to improve