Lixel Cyber Color 3DGS Aerial – Ground Fusion Workflow

This article will walk through the collection process, project prep, and processing through Lixel Cyber Color for Aerial - Ground fusion of 3D Gaussian Splats. The featured dataset was collected with a DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise and the XGRIDS Lixel Kity K1. Both devices need to collect their respective data with an RTK fix to successfully use the aerial - ground fusion option. 

In this article we will demonstrate using the Aerial-Ground fusion function in Lixel Cyber Color. This feature combines your drone images with your XGRIDS scan for improved Gaussian Splatting. Both your XGRIDS scanner and your drone will collect in RTK for this purpose. Scanning with the XGRIDS scanner will be done normally. Make sure the LCC plus point cloud option is selected for your camera settings in the Lixel Go app before scanning. Now that we’ve finished our scan let’s fly the aerial portion. For the aerial imagery we will perform a normal mapping mission over our subject and at minimum three to four series of images from the ground up to the mapping elevation with the camera focused on the subject we are trying to capture. For those image towers I’m going to take photos at one second intervals as I steadily elevate the drone. The last thing to do for collection will be the nadir mapping. 

Now that we’ve collected what we need, let’s prepare our folder for LCC. First, I’ll make a new folder, then I’ll create two more folders to organize the data I collected for LCC processing: one labeled ‘Drone’ and the other ‘Lixel.’ The project folder from the K1 will be placed in the Lixel folder and then I’ll copy over all the images collected from the drone and place them in the Drone folder. Then I can copy over the four files provided by XGRIDS. Launch the extract preview poses application to finish the file prep. We can open the included visualization tool to confirm we have all the correct camera poses. We can now launch LCC and input our data in parameters for the Aerial-Ground map fusion. Click to start processing and when it’s finished, we will have our Gaussian Splat with ground and aerial imagery.