Virtual Surveyor has added Local Coordinate System functionality to the 10.2 release of its smart drone surveying package. This means users can easily define a local coordinate system and work with new and existing survey data in those systems.

“Virtual Surveyor users can now project GPS-based drone imagery and LiDAR data directly to the local coordinate system used in their mining or earth-moving project without going through a third-party package,” said Tom Op ‘t Eyndt, Virtual Surveyor CEO. “This greatly enhances the convenience of survey projects where not being able to work in local systems is a major bottleneck.”

The Virtual Surveyor V10.2 package is an incredibly robust tool for creating surveys from drone images and LiDAR point clouds for use by engineers in construction, surface mining, and excavation projects. The package includes surveying capabilities, photogrammetric functionality, and topographic design tools in a series of progressive subscription plans differentiated by Time for past, present, and future 3D terrain surveys.

Local coordinate systems are crucial for many of the mining, excavation, and construction projects in which Virtual Surveyor is used. Due to practical and accuracy requirements, these activities typically establish custom reference systems instead of using a world or national coordinate system adopted by an authoritative geodetic organization.

Authoritative, publicly available world coordinate systems are useful for large-area referencing. However, they introduce distortions that are unacceptable for engineering projects typically done in smaller areas, necessitating the use of local reference systems.

Unlike global or national coordinate systems, local systems need to be established by measuring a set of points both with GPS and total station around the project area. Once established they minimize distortions by applying site-specific scale factors that reconcile grid coordinates with true ground distances, addressing grid-to-ground discrepancies caused by elevation and Earth curvature.

Projecting GPS drone image data, or any other latitude-longitude data, to the local coordinate system has required time-consuming additional steps in third-party software.

Virtual Surveyor 10.2 has eliminated this data incompatibility issue. With a few mouse clicks, users can define an entirely new local coordinate system in their units of choice, process their GPS-based drone imagery into such system, or import existing data already referenced to it. They can even export their survey maps back out to an authoritative world coordinate system.

The transformation is faster and more convenient, and measurements of distances, areas, and volumes in Virtual Surveyor are more accurate for projects in regions where world systems are insufficient.

To further streamline the transformation process in V10.2, Virtual Surveyor has expanded the list of authoritative world coordinate systems available in the package to which drone survey projects can be exported. These now include European Petroleum Survey Group (EPSG), Main Roads Western Australia (MRWA), Landgate (Western Australia), and ESRI. Virtual Surveyor always remembers the local or world coordinate system used for a given project.

Virtual Surveyor has also introduced several enhancements in V10.2 designed to improve the overall user experience offered by the package:

• Accelerated Point Gridding – The gridding algorithms have been improved so that creation of Q-Points, Low-Pass Points, and Regular Grids can be accomplished at twice the original speed.
• Save a Copy Function – This improved feature makes it easier to move projects with all their referenced terrain data, helping teams to collaborate on cloud locations.
• Improved Pop-Ups – Yes or No selections can now be made from the keyboard or the mouse.

The new functionality in Virtual Surveyor 10.2 is available in all four software levels. To start a free 14-day trial of Virtual Surveyor and to view details of the Valley, Ridge, Mountain, and Peak pricing plans, visit www.virtual-surveyor.com.

About Virtual Surveyor

Virtual Surveyor software enables professional surveyors to generate accurate topographic end products from drone photos five times faster than traditional field work in a seamless fully integrated workflow. Now used in 88 countries, Virtual Surveyor creates topographic information from drone data in very short timeframes. In a typical application, the suite generates an orthomosaic and digital surface model (DSM) from UAV imagery and then transfers the survey-grade terrain products to an interactive virtual environment onscreen where surveyors can select the survey points and breaklines that define topography. Standard topographic outputs from the Virtual Surveyor software are Surfaces or TINs (Triangular Irregular Network), Contours, Line Surveys, Stockpile Reports and Cut-and-Fill Maps for use in a variety of engineering design applications.