Reality mapping, a powerful capability within ArcGIS, transforms the way we understand and interact with our world by allowing us to create detailed, accurate digital representations of the physical world. As we approach the end of 2024, let’s dive into the latest advancements and release updates across the ArcGIS Reality family of products, including ArcGIS Reality Studio, ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Drone2Map, and Site Scan for ArcGIS. Read on to discover the highlights from each Q4 release and explore the links for detailed release information on each product.
Latest Reality Engine Enhancements
The Reality Engine is the core processing technology that powers all four products in the ArcGIS Reality family. Updates introduced in the Q4 release of the engine enable improved accuracy and visual quality of your reality mapping projects:
Increased Accuracy: Generate products with enhanced detail in the geometry of 3D meshes, ensuring that even thin structures such as bridges, railings, antenna towers, are accurately represented.
More True to-Life Colors: Improved True Ortho color balancing delivers more natural-appearing representations of reality, particularly when input images have inconsistent exposure.
ArcGIS Reality Studio
The latest release of ArcGIS Reality Studio introduces enhancements that help you create precise, real-world representations both faster and more efficiently. With these updates, you can streamline your workflow, reducing the time and effort required to transform data into accurate visualizations.
Editing Efficiency
Now you can create 2D and 3D polygons to define your project area and edit results efficiently. With the editing functionality, you can quickly draw polygons to correct defects in your output products, such as DSMs and True Orthos. This release empowers you to address 2.5D issues like skewed roofs, fill data gaps, and flatten unwanted object protrusions, ensuring a more accurate and refined final product. More updates to this functionality will come in future releases.
Faster Waterbody Handling
In the past, mapping water bodies like lakes or rivers required you to manually digitize detailed polygons for every project. Now, you can simply draw rough shapes around the water areas. These “coarse water polygons” can be digitized in a fraction of the time, and the Reality Engine cleans up the data, so the accuracy is not impacted. It does this by removing any bad or unreliable information while making sure that important things above the water, like boats, docks, and bridges, are still included in your map.
Efficient DSM and True Ortho Editing
Quickly refine your reconstruction results without having to reprocess the entire project. You can now make edits, submit new corrections, or update waterbody shapes, and the software will swiftly reprocess only the affected areas, saving you time.
True Ortho for Oblique Scenario
Now you can generate True Orthos from oblique imagery, a task previously limited to nadir imagery. Before this update, having both nadir and oblique imagery meant creating two separate reconstructions—one for DSMs and True Orthos, and another that didn’t support these features. With our new functionality, you can now save considerable time by creating a single reconstruction that incorporates both nadir and oblique imagery.
These were just some highlights from the latest ArcGIS Reality Studio release, for more detailed information on all the latest improvements and enhancements, check out the release blog.
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ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro
New functionality in ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro introduces the ability to utilize new data types and generate additional output products. This matters because it enables more comprehensive analysis and enhances versatility, leading to better-informed decisions and improved workflow efficiency.
Generate True Orthos from thermal drone images
By creating a True Ortho from thermal drone images, users can now extract surface temperature information from the True Ortho to support applications such as precision agriculture.
Generate DTMs
It is now possible for users to create Digital Terrain Models that exclude above ground elements. These models are useful for analyzing terrain and are a new addition to the existing DSMs (Digital Surface Models), which contain above ground features and are commonly utilized for feature extraction purposes.
Generate True Orthos for Aerial Oblique data
It is now possible to generate True Orthos from aerial oblique imagery.
Create Output Products from Multiple Satellite Sensors
You can now seamlessly combine imagery from diverse satellite sensors into a single project, enabling the generation of robust outputs. This will give organizations the flexibility to find enough overlapping imagery to produce high-quality results.
Enhanced Frames and Cameras Table
The Frames and Cameras table tool has been significantly enhanced to simplify ingesting imagery from aerial sensors not natively supported by ArcGIS Pro. Exterior orientation files stored as *.eo, *.txt or *.csv can be easily parsed without the need for pre-editing the file. The ability to define sensor angle format and units has also been added, eliminating the need for reprocessing exterior orientation files to a format compatible with ArcGIS Pro.
Learn more about ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro by exploring the documentation.
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ArcGIS Drone2Map
With Drone2Map’s latest updates, users can expect a smoother, more efficient processing experience and enhanced accuracy in measuring distances and areas. This means you’ll save time, reduce errors, and produce higher-quality map outputs more efficiently.
Workflow Enhancements
- Link Thermal IR Images to Ground Control Points: The Image Links Editor now lets users link thermal infrared images to ground control points. This helps you find special features in thermal images.
- Metadata Viewer: Drone2Map introduces a built-in metadata viewer, facilitating quick review and search of image metadata to prevent processing issues.
- Improved Project Feedback: New projects now validate image coordinate systems against project coordinate systems, with warnings for mismatches and detailed processing reports on image accuracy settings.
- Expanded Inspection Functionality: Inspection schemas now include date and time fields, configurable to display the current date for multi-date inspections.
Measurement Improvements
- Mensuration tool enhancements: Users now have more control to validate and document measurements on their project sites. Individual measurements can be copied to modify settings (such as the base elevation used for a volume calculation) to ensure accuracy in the final results. In addition, for multi-date projects, mensuration results can be imported into new projects and re-measured to compare measurements over time (e.g. the change of material stockpile volumes).
- Import GIS Feature Classes: GIS feature classes (point, line and polygon) can now be imported to ensure precise placement of measurements, improving accuracy and confidence of multi-date measurements.
Enhanced Outputs
- Publish Image indices to ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise: Image indices (processed images) such as NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) can now be published to ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise. Image indices have long been available for viewing on screen in Drone2Map, but previously could not be published, so users had to use tools in ArcGIS Pro or ArcGIS Online after publishing to re-create these valuable processed images.
To read more about all the detailed release information for ArcGIS Drone2Map take a look at the release blog.
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Site Scan for ArcGIS
With updates from the latest Site Scan releases, managing and processing drone data has become more accessible and efficient than ever. Whether you’re working in a multilingual environment, need to analyze fleet data in depth, or want to fine-tune your mission outputs, these updates are designed to streamline your workflow and enhance the quality of your results.
Define A Processing Extent Using A Mission Area
You can now define a processing extent, or mission area, that will determine the extent of all processed outputs. Using a mission area can help trim edges to improve the overall quality of your outputs, focus your outputs on a specific region of the site, or to process all missions in a project with an identical extent.
Expanded Translation Support
Site Scan for ArcGIS is now translated into 40 languages, adhering to Esri’s internationalization and localization standards. Site Scan will prioritize ArcGIS Online’s language settings if ArcGIS Online authentication in Site Scan is used. Otherwise, it will use the browser’s language.
Export Fleet Management Data
Fleet managers can now export flights, aircraft, batteries, and pilots from fleet management by using the export option at the top of each list. Flights can be filtered by date and attribute to narrow down the flights that are exported. This can help organizations who want to do further analysis with their fleet management data or need to combine fleet management data from multiple sources.
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The latest updates across the ArcGIS Reality family of products bring significant advancements that enhance accuracy, efficiency, and versatility. From improved reality mapping capabilities to streamlined workflows and expanded language support, these updates are designed to help you create more precise and comprehensive digital representations of the physical world. As we close out 2024, these innovations ensure that you can make better-informed decisions and achieve higher-quality results in your reality mapping projects.
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