Case study / Central Alberta / Mapping
Aggregate pit terrain capture at 0.01 m RMSE
A pit capture that returned 2.51 cm per pixel at 0.01 m RMSE using live network corrections, delivered with the raw RTK imagery for client reprocessing.
The challenge
An environmental engineering client required terrain in real world coordinates that would line up with existing datasets, and needed the positional error measured rather than assumed. They also intended to reprocess the imagery in their own photogrammetry software.
The site
An active aggregate pit in central Alberta, captured across working faces and stockpile areas.
Equipment and method
Mavic 3E with corrections streamed live from an Alberta base station network, planned for high redundancy across the faces so the surface would resolve cleanly.
Airspace and safety
Rural operating airspace with coordination around pit equipment.
Deliverables
Orthomosaic, terrain and surface models, and the raw RTK tagged source imagery alongside the processed outputs.
Result
1,000 aligned frames at a 2.51 cm/px ground sample distance with a reported 0.01 m RMSE. Handing over the raw tagged imagery removed any question about the processing pipeline, because the client could reproduce the result themselves.
Project statistics
- Aligned frames
- 1,000
- Ground sample distance
- 2.51 cm/px
- Reported RMSE
- 0.01 m
- Positioning
- NTRIP absolute
- Handover
- Processed + raw RTK
Named references are provided during scoping, so you can speak directly to a client who has run this kind of work.