Features
Everything from the flight plan
to the answer
Outback Deploy takes a survey from the path you fly to the figures you act on, without the imagery leaving the platform. This is the long list.
01 / Before the flight
Plan it
Draw the ground to cover and get a flight path from the camera you are actually flying.
- A lawnmower path generated from sensor geometry, altitude and the overlap you ask for — not from a guess at spacing.
- Ground resolution and frame count worked out before you leave, so the card size and the battery count are known.
- Your own airframes and cameras, so the plan matches the aircraft rather than a stock profile.
- Export the path and fly it.
02 / Getting it in
Upload from the field
A survey is several hundred frames and several gigabytes, on whatever connection the shed has. The uploader assumes that interruption is normal rather than exceptional.
- Resumable: stop, close the laptop, come back, and only what is missing is sent.
- Frames already held are settled without the bytes crossing the wire, so re-uploading a mostly-finished survey takes minutes.
- Every frame is committed only once its assembled bytes match the checksum declared before it was sent.
- Capture time, position, altitude and gimbal attitude are read from each frame, including the XMP fields ordinary EXIF misses.
03 / Making the picture
Stitch and model
Photogrammetry on the platform’s own GPU. You upload frames and get ground.
- Orthomosaic — the corrected, flattened image of the ground.
- Surface model (DSM) and bare-earth model (DTM).
- Point cloud.
- Map tiles cut to the resolution the imagery actually holds, so zooming in shows detail rather than a smeared enlargement.
04 / Looking at it
The map
Every survey on one map, with the imagery drawn where it was flown.
- Switch a survey between imagery, surface and terrain.
- Earlier surveys of the same ground are found by footprint, not by what somebody filed them under — so last year’s flight of this paddock is one click away.
- Compare two surveys side by side, sampled evenly across each flight rather than the first few frames of the climb-out.
- A survey still being processed shows the ground it covered and what it is waiting on, rather than a half-made picture.
05 / Asking questions
Analyses
Pick a survey, pick an area, pick a question. Seven of them, each returning figures and shapes you can take away.
- Tree identifier — canopy patches, heights, crown areas.
- Stockpile volume.
- Water flow and ponding.
- Watercourse detection.
- Slope and aspect.
- Erosion and gullies.
- Pipe finder — trench, thermal and surface signals, fused so one trench seen three ways is one place to walk.
06 / Teaching it
Models you train yourself
For the thing nobody wrote a rule for. Outline examples on your own imagery, train on the GPU, and it becomes another analysis with the same results and the same exports.
- Choose the ground to train on from the tile grid, so an area too small to learn from cannot be drawn.
- Trained on the platform’s own card — your imagery is not sent anywhere to be learned from.
- Run it, then mark what it got right and what it got wrong; both answers are kept, and a wrong one is worth more.
- Versions are kept, scored and can be rolled back.
07 / Ground nobody flew
Base imagery
Draw a rectangle anywhere and the public aerial imagery under it becomes a survey — for the next property, or for this one before you owned a drone.
- Analysed and labelled like any other survey.
- Credited to its source, and refused to a model trained finer than the imagery can support rather than quietly finding nothing.
08 / Taking it away
Exports and reports
Nothing here is a dead end. Everything the platform works out leaves in a format something else can open.
- GeoJSON, CSV, KML, KMZ, GPX, GeoPackage and Shapefile.
- A visiting route ordered to remove the crossings, so the list is walkable in the order it is given.
- A one-page survey report as a PDF, over your name — what was flown, over what ground, to what accuracy.
- Crop and download any layer over an area you draw.
09 / How it is kept
Your operator, your imagery
Each survey operator has its own address and its own data.
- Imagery never leaves your operator, and no query can reach across from another.
- Accounts belong to one operator; staff sign in at your address.
- An API for the aircraft or the office system, with tokens you issue and revoke.
- Nightly database backup, restored to prove the backup works.
See how it fits together
The order these happen in, and what the platform is doing while you wait, is set out on How it works.