I have to admit that I am sometimes a bit lazy. Rather than solving a problem once and working with the solution, in some cases I keep twiddling with the same problem again and again. Calculating things like viewing angles, ground resolution, motion blur or image overlap for aerial photography is a case in point. There must be a dozen or so spreadsheet files on my various computers which I used to do such calculations. I kept re-inventing the wheel again and again for myself and when others asked me for help.
Now I finally got around writing a small piece of software for this specific task. It is a simple tool that allows to calculate parameters like ground pixel size, motion blur and sequential image overlap from UAV flight parameters (velocity and altitude) and camera parameters (focal length, shutter time, image interval etc.). Calculation assumes a vertical camera view for simplicity. Image y dimensions are those in flight direction, image x dimensions are those perpendicular to flight direction. Default camera values are for Canon G12 at the wide angle limit. Five to six seconds is the approximate minimum image interval using a CHDK interval script. In continous shooting mode, a minimum interval of approximately one second can be achieved.
Now that I created this tool, why not share it? UAVphoto is published under the GNU General Public License and can be downloaded from Sourceforge.
2 and 3 Dimensions 