Boeing subsidiary Insitu has revealed that its latest advancements in High Accuracy Photogrammetry (HAP) are pushing the theoretical limits of aerial photography at altitude.

Last month Insitu’s latest prototype carried a HAP payload that can capture images accurate to within five centimeters (cm) horizontally and 10cm vertically. Insitu describes this new capability as “ground-breaking”, and says it “now leads the industry in accuracy that can be obtained without ground control from a fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial System traveling more than 100km (62.1 miles) per hour from higher than 1,000 ft.”

Read more: DroneBase & Airbus Aerial Partner to Combine Drone and Satellite Imagery

ScanEagle gets an upgrade?

Insitu’s ScanEagle is an ideal platform for the latest HAP technology. More than 150 square kilometers (nearly 60 square miles) can be covered in a single flight, and with the latest HAP payload, imagery with greater accuracy than ever before can be captured.

A HAP payload can be integrated with a Phase One 50 or 100-megapixel camera onto UAS platforms operating as part of Insitu’s INEXATM suite of remote sensing products, information delivery services and solutions for enterprise customers.

The focus for Insitu’s HAP technology is to support mining, oil or gas operations. HAP is ideal for large area surveys required over open cut mining tenements, distributed oil and gas infrastructure, large-scale construction operations, road, rail and pipeline corridors and more.

In remote sensing, the Ground Sampling Distance (GSD) — in a digital photo of the ground from above — is the distance between pixel centers measured on the ground. With recent improvements to Insitu’s HAP payload, accuracies to within two-to-three pixels have been validated.

That means that a 3cm GSD will result in a 3D global accuracy of 6-to-9cm.

HAP provides persistent monitoring