Experience of Constructing Digital Elevation Models with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper briefly reviews modern approaches and methods for generating digital elevation models. The focus is on photogrammetric model generation methods: photogrammetry itself relies on a series of overlapping photographic images. In our study, a camera was mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). We describe the major steps in generating digital elevation models, gear requirements, image capture details, and software used. Lastly, we show how we created a local digital elevation model of part of an island near the northern shore of Lake Ladoga.