Unmanned Aerial Systems (aka Drones) are now being approved by the FAA for a number of commercial uses and the expectation is that use cases will continue to expand as the Government begins to consider longer-range operations that are enabled through Beyond Line of Sight (BLOS) operations. Drones flew over homes, businesses and other sensitive geographic areas to capture aerial imagery, which can be published or shown on media channels (e.g., YouTube, Facebook).
Our client uses these drone images to augment with geospatial metadata used in the processing of orthomosaics, 3D digital terrain models and other artifacts. Many of these metadata features are integrated with on-board applications. These applications bind flight controller and payload (e.g., camera) data into geo-tag metadata. The raw imagery captured by drones & metadata are then used for image processing to produce a variety of digital imagery products for engineering and entertainment purposes. These products will often have privacy-sensitive information of private properties and commercial organizations may find themselves liable for exposure of such data. As drones proliferate and are flown over homes, businesses and other sensitive geographic areas, the client was seeing a rise in citizen privacy concerns. Therefore, the company wanted a cloud-enabled system that can help them eliminate these concerns and provide strong support for resolution degradation of IoT-originated geospatial images.