15 Aug 2018, Alpiniøya

Mike Struik (PolarQuest 2018 Technical Coordinator) and Gianluca Casagrande (Italian Geographical Society and European University of Rome) performed an expeditive aero-photogrammetric survey of Alpiniøya, a small rocky island discovered in 1928 by Italian officer Gennaro Sora and Dutch arctic guide Sjef van Dongen. The island was named after Sora’s Itali an army corps.

The ~1 square-kilometre island was flown over for less than 1 hour by a consumer-level drone, yielding extensive coverage with 20 mega-pixel nadiral and oblique views. After the flight sessions, images underwent initial processing onboard Nanuq.

Both a preliminary dense point cloud and a texturized mesh were developed within 2 hours of computing time, producing an expressive 3D model of the island. The obtained level of detail in the images allowed to discriminate objects in the range of a few centimetres. The readability of images was therefore assessed to be quite high, considering that most publicly available imagery of the island show generally a much coarser ground sampling distance.

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