We recently tried out a paint pole-mounted camera as another method to derive topographic maps. We tested our methods in the dunes on a recent trip to Sapelo Island, GA. At the bottom is the video taken from our Canon Powershot D20. We used a paint pole purchased from Home Depot and camera mounting equipment sold by PolePixie. The video above is the raw video. We edited this video down and then removed the shakiness before extracting frames in Photomodeler. The resulting dense point cloud is shown above. The image still requires some post-processing to remove relief introduced by the vegetation, but all in all, the paint pole seems well suited to capture topography.
