Lanner-CamPod

Lanner camera pod on Cessna

Lanner CamPod

Oblique aerial photographs of wildlife and habitat are becoming an important part of aerial surveys. Some survey implementors have specially modified aircraft which allow cameras to be placed and operated inside the aircraft cabin, but these modified aircraft are rare and it is extremely difficult and expensive to make modifications to standard aircraft. In 2018-2019 at the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute we developed a relatively inexpensive oblique camera system that could be attached to any Cessna 172, 182 or 206 wing strut to get the same field of view as a human observer for a sample count.

This document outlines the elements and usage of the v2 Lanner camera pod, and suggestions for further development. The v1 site is available as a release (click then download and unzip).

Go to the code view to see all the resources

Resources

Copyright Howard L. Frederick (Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute) 2018-2020.

Developed with support from Vulcan Inc., Seattle, WA and the Paul G Allen Foundation.

The "Strut Digital Eyeball" in flight over Ruaha National Park, 2018.

Aims & mission profile

The requirements of the camera system are to be able to take stable, hi-quality photographs on a continuous basis during flight, ideally with 50% overlap between images, and recording the angles of view to be able to reconstruct the geometry of the photographic footprint.

Equipment

Campod_v1_labelled

Each ‘pod’ consists of:

*Not yet implemented

Fieldwork so far and lessons learned

2022

Lanner pods were used extensively in Zambia during the 2022 KAZA aerial census. Field notes will be updated here soon.

2019:

A set of images was collected in Tarangire National Park with a redesigned housing system, where the camera pod was fitted to a microlight (Savannah) using a two-point attachment system.

For the RR-SL systems, a further 25,000 images were collected in the corridor between the two ecosystems as part of a trial monitoring system for the corridor (for WCS Tanzania).

2018:

Camera pods were trialled in Ruaha-Katavi-Lukwati (RR) and Selous-Mikumi (SL) ecosystems in late 2018 as part of the TAWIRI aerial survey programme. Surveys were primarily funded by WCS and FZS, respectively, and covered 90,000 km² and 110,000 km².

Approximately 200,000 images were collected in RR, and 150,000 in SL.

Protocol

Ideal protocol follows

  1. Anker battery bank was fully charged the evening before. Two bars (out of four) are enough for a whole 4-hour flight, though.
  2. Time was set on the camera either manually (from GPS time) or with a USB connection on a laptop.
  3. Pods were attached to the aircraft ~ half an hour before flight. Cameras were set to mimic the field of view of the observer by visual inspection relative to the RSO camera position and the centre of the SRF rods.
    1. In test flights and later flights in SL the cameras were set at 45° angles.
    2. Clamps were left on the wing struts, and the pods slotted into the clamps each time (necessitating angle adjustment).
  4. Before closing the housings, the cameras were set to trigger photos ~ 10 minutes after takeoff (enough time to reach closest transects) using the Interval Timer menu:
    1. Start time ~ 0715, but this depended on how close the transects were expected to start and how diligent the team was likely to be about getting into the air on time.
    2. Interval 2 seconds
    3. Number of photos 8000 (enough for 4.4 hours of data collection, which would exceed all but the longest possible collection time)
  5. On return, cameras that were still running were manually turned off by reaching in through the porthole. Pods were disconnected from the clamp using the set screw (bolt) and disassembled in the workshop.
  6. SD cards were removed from the cameras after flight and data were copied to an external harddrive and later to a backup.

Performance

Optimisations / development

ToDo list