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Point Cloud derived from historical aerial imagery of the South Cow Mountain Recreational Area, Lake County, California, 19770527

Published by U.S. Geological Survey | Department of the Interior | Metadata Last Checked: January 27, 2026 | Last Modified: 2023-03-13T00:00:00Z
The USGS, in cooperation with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), created a series of geospatial products using historic aerial imagery and Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry methods. A point cloud dataset (.laz) of the South Cow Mountain Recreational Area was generated from stereo historical aerial imagery acquired in by the BLM in 1977. The aerial imagery was downloaded from the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Data Center's USGS Single Aerial Frame Photo archive and the point cloud was created using USGS guidelines. Photo alignment, error reduction, and dense point cloud generation followed guidelines documented in Over, J.R., Ritchie, A.C., Kranenburg, C.J., Brown, J.A., Buscombe, D., Noble, T., Sherwood, C.R., Warrick, J.A., and Wernette, P.A., 2021, Processing coastal imagery with Agisoft Metashape Professional Edition, version 1.6— Structure from motion workflow documentation: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2021–1039, 46 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20211039. Photo-identifiable points, selected as synthetic ground-control points, followed guidelines documented in Sherwood, C.R.; Warrick, J.A.; Hill, A.D.; Ritchie, A.C.; Andrews, B.D., and Plant, N.G., 2018. Rapid, remote assessment of Hurricane Matthew impacts using four-dimensional structure-from-motion photogrammetry https://doi.org/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-18-00016.1 Additional post-processing of the 1977 dense point cloud, using Iterative Closest Point (ICP) analysis, was used to improve the alignment with the 2015 LiDAR point cloud. The ICP analysis is explained in Low, K.L., 2004. Linear least-squares optimization for point-to-plane ICP surface registration. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 4(10), pp.1-3. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~lowkl/publications/lowk_point-to-plane_icp_techrep.pdf Data were processed using photogrammetry to generate a three-dimensional point cloud that identifies pixels of an object from multiple images taken from various angles and calculates the x, y, and z coordinates of that object/pixel. The point cloud was processed to create a digital surface model of the study area (57.3 cm resolution). Finally, source images were stitched together based on shared pixels and orthogonally adjusted to the digital surface model to create a high resolution (approximately 18.3 cm) orthoimage for the study area.

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