OpenDroneMap

What are some algorithms involved in building a project like this?

This is a very cool software! I highly recommend to try it out if you own a drone, even if just for a fun, I learned so much when I was tinkering with it.

Around a year ago I needed to obtain an aerial map of some specific area, but due to recent drastic changes (construction work) and poor quality of the public maps I had to somehow create my own. I fly drones for recreational purposes so I was thinking about using it to make that map when I found out about ODM which is exactly what I was looking for. ODM itself just processes already obtained images (AFAIK) so there is also a whole process of getting them from drone. That's when I found about other software for planning fully automated flight paths so there is a perfect overlap between the photos (required for quality maps and 3D reconstruction). I managed to make a high quality map with 1px:1cm ratio via ODM that I still use from time to time.

Like I mentioned if you own a drone I would recommend to try it out even if it's just for fun as for my case I learned a lot of other stuff I didn't knew before like that automated flight path planning.

I've been trying to get my organization to use ODM, but finding it difficult. The problem is analogous to the issues that Gimp has to Photoshop or Linux to Windows -- ease of use. Additionally, even if you properly configure the software the quality still is not comparable to the big proprietary players in the photogrammetry field: Bentley Systems; Pix4D; Drone Deploy.

A major reason for the quality issues is that the major drone manufacturers work directly with the proprietary photogrammetry software providers in the field to optimize the algorithms to their drones. These drone manufacturers then promote these proprietary solutions. This puts ODM at a disadvantage as there is no short-term financial incentive for manufacturers to promote ODM.

Like other fields, the proprietary photogrammetry industry is increasing moving to implementing their solutions exclusively in the cloud. This is forcing folks to give up their data and building a data moat - a problem for my organization.

I hope ODM keeps developing and becomes as ubiquitous as linux. Its quality is getting close for my organization to consider its implementation. Keep up the great work!

Are maps created by the OpenDroneMap community catalogued anywhere? I may have missed the obvious answer, but only found docs about creating maps (which is, of course, extremely cool!).

What motivated the choice of AGPL license?

OpenDroneMap has dependencies on GDAL, Proj4J, GeoPackage, SciPy, Python, Nginx, and Django, among other packages. Those foundational libraries tend to have more permissive licenses (PSF, MIT, BSD 3-Clause, Apache 2.0 etc.).