Hi everyone, here in the U.K, due to our planning laws we surveyors tend to spend up to 50% of our time producing building face elevations. At the moment I use the conventional method of sketching the building and then using my Leica TPS to fix key points and referring to digital photos when drawing up back at the office. Having recently had to produce numerous elevations of relatively basic commercial office buildings it struck me that I could save a lot of time by cutting out the sketching the buildings part but using a tablet toĀ take the photos instead. My idea is to use a tablet to take a good quality photo and then hopefully use a stylus to make a point mark and reference number directly onto the screen. Iāve attached an example of the kind of result Iām looking for. It'd also be necessary to be able to zoom in on higher detail areas but then have the written numbers scale back down to a default when zooming back out, also it would be great if my hand-written numbers could be turned into text. My question is does anyone know of any software that could provide this type of function? I'm not bothered which kind of tablet I use, Apple, Windows or Android. Please note I'm well aware of photogrammetry and it's not a route I want to explore.
You need to be a member of Land Surveyors United - Global Surveying Community to add thoughts!
Replies
David, are you transferring these elevations into Autocad or just annotating the photos?
ian
There is a great android app called ImageMeter - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.dirkfarin.imagemet...
I am using a Sokkia Set 3bII along with a tablet running a program called endiscope.Ā I made a cardboard mount that fits over the eyepiece of the Set3 and connected that to a cheap $2.50 camera (that includes shipping) that I got overr ebay.Ā I sight in my object and then use a utility on my smart phone called timestamp camera.Ā Since Im using this to determine azimuth with celesstial objects.Ā Timestamp camera gives me time to the millisecond so I take a photo of the digital display of the Set3.Ā Pictures taken with the endescope on the tablet show what Im looking at, the timestamp is not as accurate as the cell phone but close enough to match the Set3 photo to the tablet photo.
I then sit down and match the photos up and paste them into word with descriptions.
Hope this helps
Thanks for all the replies, I'm most impressed by Vedran Stojnovic's suggestion. Image Meter Pro does precisely what I was looking for and all for Ā£3.59. So simple and easy to use and so good I went out at the weekend and bought a new tablet ready to begin using it on site. Many thanks Vedran.
We have just started beta testing this app/softwareĀ https://www.nrgsurveys.co.uk/photo-gis-camera-gis/ which may be of use to you. Adding a text overlay to the image is a function we could also possibly add to the app at this stage.
I regularly do this with subsea structures ā whether on the quay or installed subsea ā using Adobe Photoshop. It has great tools for adding text and shapes to a photo.
http://www.theolt.com/web/