Thermal cameras continue to become more prevalent and provide support for higher resolutions. Their sensors allow you to measure the amount of heat radiating off a surface. When using a thermal camera on a drone, you can fly over large areas and capture pixels values that represent temperature at a high resolution. Obtaining such results in the past required more expensive or time-consuming satellite, aerial, or ground observations.
Thermal processing in ArcGIS Drone2Map is done by reading specific metadata tags attached to the images. These provide the values required for the pixel value to thermal value calculations.
Note:
Drone2Map supports a wide range of thermal cameras; however, some DJI thermal cameras may require an optional installation file, which can be downloaded from My Esri and installed alongside Drone2Map 2024.1 and later.
Images from a thermal camera can be captured in different formats, the most popular of which are radiometric JPEG or TIFF. These are the formats that ArcGIS Drone2Map supports and allows for processing into a thermal true ortho product. Thermal cameras support is listed in the following table: Supported thermal cameras
Future versions of ArcGIS Drone2Map will continue to expand support for new cameras.
When processing thermal true ortho products, the temperature values can be output as Celsius or Fahrenheit. To set the temperature values, click Settings > General tab > Temperature Settings.
Best practices
While ArcGIS Drone2Map can process thermal imagery, it is important to maintain good collection practices to achieve the highest accuracy and best-quality products. The following practices can help you achieve the best field collection results:
- For thermal sensors, it is recommended that the flight plan has at least 70 percent side and frontal overlap between all images.
- For best results, capture images from a nadir viewpoint, as oblique images may cause processing to fail or drop images during the adjustment stage.
- Consider the subject matter and time of day that you are collecting the thermal imagery, as temperatures can vary greatly based on weather conditions.