// Survey Methodology

How the Moor
is Recorded

From drone capture to browser-rendered 3D Gaussian Splat — a complete aerial survey and reconstruction pipeline for Dartmoor's heritage sites.

// 01 — CAPTURE
Aerial Survey
Structured orbital and grid passes at 30–120m AGL. DJI Mini 4 Pro for wide coverage, Avata 2 for low-altitude FPV detail passes through structures. 70–85% overlap between frames at multiple altitudes and angles.
// 02 — SFMPROCESS
Structure from Motion
COLMAP processes all frames to extract feature points, match across images, and solve for camera pose. Outputs a sparse point cloud and calibrated camera positions for every frame in the sequence.
// 03 — TRAINING
Gaussian Splatting
3DGS optimisation runs for 30,000 iterations, fitting millions of oriented Gaussians to the scene. Each Gaussian encodes position, opacity, colour (spherical harmonics) and a 3D covariance ellipsoid.
// 04 — DELIVERY
Web Rendering
gsplat.js renders the splat field in WebGL — real-time depth-sorted alpha compositing, no plugin required. Models are streamed progressively so scenes become navigable before full load completes.
// Hardware

Survey Platform

AIR

DJI Mini 4 Pro

Primary survey drone. 4K/60 HDR, 1/1.3" sensor, omnidirectional obstacle sensing. Used for orbital and grid capture passes.

FPV

DJI Avata 2

Close-quarters FPV passes through archways, mine adits, and structures. 155° FOV capture for tight-radius reconstruction.

GND

Ground Gimbal Rig

Stabilised ground-level passes for base structure coverage and overlap with aerial frames in the lower camera pyramid.

NEO

DJI Neo

Compact supplementary capture for confined heritage spaces where larger drones cannot safely operate.

// Output Formats

Data Formats

Format Use Size
.splat Compressed binary splat — web delivery 30–200MB
.ply Full-resolution point cloud archive 200MB–2GB
COLMAP DB Camera poses, sparse point cloud Varies
path.json Camera flythrough keyframe paths <10KB
GeoTIFF Orthorectified aerial mosaic 500MB–3GB
Point cloud exports available on request
Contact: able@hylashub.me