Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán
Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán

Overview of this book

PostGIS is a spatial database that integrates the advanced storage and analysis of vector and raster data, and is remarkably flexible and powerful. PostGIS provides support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database and is currently the most popular open source spatial databases. If you want to explore the complete range of PostGIS techniques and expose related extensions, then this book is for you. This book is a comprehensive guide to PostGIS tools and concepts which are required to manage, manipulate, and analyze spatial data in PostGIS. It covers key spatial data manipulation tasks, explaining not only how each task is performed, but also why. It provides practical guidance allowing you to safely take advantage of the advanced technology in PostGIS in order to simplify your spatial database administration tasks. Furthermore, you will learn to take advantage of basic and advanced vector, raster, and routing approaches along with the concepts of data maintenance, optimization, and performance, and will help you to integrate these into a large ecosystem of desktop and web tools. By the end, you will be armed with all the tools and instructions you need to both manage the spatial database system and make better decisions as your project's requirements evolve.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

UAV photogrammetry in PostGIS – point cloud


We will use the techniques we've used in the previous recipe named Creating arbitrary 3D objects for PostGIS learn how to create and import a UAV-derived point cloud in PostGIS.

One caveat before we begin is that while we will be working with geospatial data, we will be doing so in relative space, rather than a known coordinate system. In other words, this approach will calculate our dataset in an arbitrary coordinate system. ST_Affine could be used in combination with the field measurements of locations to transform our data into a known coordinate system, but this is beyond the scope of this book.

Getting ready

Much like with the Creating arbitrary 3D objects for PostGIS recipe,  we will be taking an image series and converting it into a point cloud. In this case, however, our image series will be from UAV imagery. Download the image series included in the code folder for this chapter, uas_flight, and feed it into VisualSFM (check http://ccwu.me...