This application converts data files captured using visible and thermal cameras from Astro Ecology's drones.
It is specifically designed to work with the data produced by the Astro-Ecology Raspberry Pi based thermal/visible imaging system.
This is a standalone application. It does not need to be installed, although you may need to run vc_redistx64.exe prior to launching the application to install some C++ libraries.
To download the most recent release, please go here and download drone_image_converter.zip. Extract the zip file and run data_converter.exe.
The application is simple: you provide an input folder containing the data files from a flight, and an output folder (by default this is set to the input folder). The output is:
- Three folders: RGB images, preview thermal images (8-bit auto dynamic range) and 16-bit raw thermal images
- An
rgb.aviandthermal.avivideo in MJPG format. - GPS logs for each camera (which you can use with Pix4D)
Clicking "Convert" will begin to convert the data found by the application. You can monitor progress in several ways.
- The log window will show you informative output about what the program is doing, and will indicate if an error has occurred.
- The image window will show you the most recently processed image (useful for quickly seeing a flight played back).
- If there is a valid GPS fix, the coordinates and altitude will be displayed.
- There is an overall progress bar.
Note:
- There should be a
gps.csvfile in your data folder. This is used to generate Pix4D-compatible GPS logs for both thermal and RGB cameras. - There can be either RGB data files, thermal data files, or both. The program will automatically process each separately.
- For every
thermal_*.datfile, there must be a correspondingthermal_offset*.txtfile. If this offset file doesn't exist, the software won't know how to split the raw data into images. - If only thermal data is present, the output video frame rate is set to 20Hz, otherwise it is set to 7Hz. This corresponds to the setup on the capture system.