Photogrammetry equipment: everything you need, from phone to drone

Photogrammetry’s equipment list runs from a phone to a quadruped robot, and the surprise for most people is how little of it is essential. A camera, a way to set scale, and processing: that is the method. Everything else buys accuracy, coverage, speed or convenience, and this page says what each piece buys and roughly what it costs, so a kit can be assembled for the job rather than for the catalogue.

The kit, piece by piece

• Camera and lensThe instrument itself. Sensor size, a stable lens and a global or well-behaved shutter matter more than megapixels. Any camera works on an object; a survey wants a 1-inch sensor or larger.$500–5,000 · the cameras page
• PhoneA real photogrammetry camera for objects and small scenes, with a scale bar. Small sensor and rolling shutter, so hold still and keep the light even.already in your pocket
• Mapping droneA camera with a flight plan. Multirotor for most sites; fixed-wing or VTOL for large areas. RTK positioning on the better ones.$1,500–15,000 · the drones page
• Ground control targetsPrinted or painted targets surveyed before the flight and clicked afterwards. The most effective accuracy purchase there is; a set of ten costs less than a lens.$50–500 the set
• GNSS base and roverSurveys the targets and check points to centimetres, and corrects the drone's positions (RTK or PPK). The rover is the surveyor's; the base can be a network subscription.$2,000–15,000, or a subscription
• Total stationSurveys targets where GNSS cannot see the sky: under cover, in a pit, on a façade. Millimetres, and the instrument check points are measured with in published tests.$5,000–30,000
• Scale bars and coded targetsFor close-range work: a bar of known length or targets at measured spacing in the photographs, so the model has a size. Nothing in a photograph says how big anything is.$20–300
• Lights and polarisersEven light makes matching work; a cross-polarised flash removes the reflections that break it on shiny objects. Studio kit for close-range, irrelevant from a drone.$100–2,000
• Laser scannerNot photogrammetry, but its companion: millimetres from a tripod, or centimetres from a handheld walked through a building. For blank surfaces, interiors and faces.$10,000–100,000 · the scanners page
• Drone LiDARLaser from the air for the ground under trees and for wires. Usually flown beside a camera rather than instead of one.$10,000–150,000+ · LiDAR vs photogrammetry
• Ground robotA quadruped or rover that walks a recorded route carrying a scanner or a 360 camera, on a schedule. Interiors and repeat capture; expensive and new.about $74,500 reported for one quadruped · the robots page
• Processing and a viewerA workstation and desktop software, or a cloud service; then a platform where the model is measured and shared by the people who need it.subscription · the software page

Capture

The camera decides the pixel and the pixel decides the accuracy, so the camera is the one piece worth over-buying. What matters, in order: sensor size (a 1-inch sensor or larger for survey work), a lens that holds its focus and does not zoom, a shutter that is global or at least fast and modelled, and only then megapixels. The cameras page goes through the spec sheet line by line.

The drone is the camera’s legs. For a site under fifty hectares a multirotor is the practical choice: it takes off from a truck bed, holds a line in wind, and the better ones carry a 20–45 MP camera with RTK built in. Fixed-wing and VTOL aircraft cover square kilometres a flight at the price of a landing strip or a heavier airframe. The drones page compares them.

Control and scale

This is the equipment that turns a model into a survey, and it is the cheapest equipment on the list.

Targets

Checkerboard or quartered squares, 60–100 cm across for a drone survey, printed on board or painted on the ground. Each one surveyed, each one photographed from the ground so it can be found later.

How many

Five to ten across a site, at the edges as well as the middle, at the highest and lowest ground; more on a long or large site. Plus two or three kept out of the solution as check points.

The rover

A survey-grade GNSS receiver on a pole, positioned against a base station or a network. Centimetres in a few seconds on each target. A hired surveyor's half-day if you do not own one.

RTK on the drone

Positions each photograph to a few centimetres as it is taken. Replaces most of the targets for horizontal accuracy; a few remain for the vertical and for checks.

Processing and measuring

Desktop processing wants a workstation: a modern multi-core processor, 32–64 GB of memory and a capable graphics card, and it will still take hours for a few thousand photographs. Cloud processing moves all of that to a server and returns the products into a viewer, so the computer needed is whatever runs a browser. Either way, the model then lives in a measuring platform where the crew reads volumes, grades and comparisons off it; the software page sorts the kinds.

Three kits, three budgets

The costs are orders of magnitude, not quotes; prices move and the ranges overlap. What does not move is the order of value: scale and control first, the camera second, the drone third, and everything else when the job asks for it.