The decrease in costs of UAV’s purchasing and operating is leading to a growing use
by the broader society, of aerial nadir photography, sometimes mistakenly confused with digital
airborne imaging. The small payload of low-cost UAVs involves installing compact and lightweight
cameras, without INS-GNSS micro-platforms, which are the technological system able to sync
shooting with the position and attitude of the aircraft. It follows that the flight path and the digital
images are not georeferred and therefore the use of aerial photography from low-cost UAVs can not
be used for technical purposes.
This paper is the first output of a research focused on georeferencing of digital images through the
flight paths, and conversely on the flight path drawing through the geolocation of nadir images.
Both application phases are developed in open source GIS software.
According to the conference topics, this paper discusses aspects of projective geometry related to
photography, the flight path and mutual synchronisation. The data being processed are from airborne
flights in order to solve geometric problems in the best possible configuration, to be subsequently
applied to acquisitions by UAVs
