Mavic 2 Pro - Don't try this at home!

OK, you can try this if you want to.

Digital camera sensors store the image data in two different ways. Global and Rolling shutter techniques.

What this means is that depending upon the sensor type in the camera, the light that hits the sensor will be recorded in rows as shown below.

Most drone cameras use the rolling shutter technique because it is less expensive to build from what I have read. I don't know the technical aspects to know why it is more expensive to build a global shutter sensor.

So what does this mean for the drone mapping world?

With todays digital cameras the speed at which the image is stored is extremely fast which has little affect when flying at slow speeds which can be controlled with rotor wing drones.

Flying at faster speeds such as fixed wing drones does require a more expensive camera and global shutter technique to get good imagery for mapping. This is why fixed wing drones cost more than rotor wing drones.

To test this theory I flew a small site, my home location, using my Mavic 2 Pro in two configurations. One using the normal mode facing foward along the flight line. The second is flying perpendicular to the flight line which recorded the image in the same direction as the row on the sensor.

Here is a dense point cloud in normal flight mode flying forward.

The dense point cloud is typical of what I get from Metashape Pro.

Here is a dense point cloud in perpendicular flight mode.

The dense point cloud is unuseable and inaccurate. Basically it is crap but it does demostrate that the need to fly a project site with all of the correct flight parameters such as direction, speed, capture rate, GCPs, etc. are needed to get good results.

Turning on rolling shutter compensation did not help.

Conclusion

I don't have access to a P4P to test this theory using a global shutter sensor. My hypothesis is that it would produce a slightly better result but would still be unusable. Perhaps someone could test this theory and let me know your results.

I used Litchi to fly in a perpendicular flight mode and to conrol the flight speed to 13.2 mph with a capture rate of 2 seconds between images.

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