6X image settings are set by default for the best settings in most use cases. There is also the ability to alter some of the color and exposure settings for custom applications.
Changing these values is not necessary for most applications and may prevent standard analytics from being run.
Exposure
In most normal usage, the exposure should not need to be adjusted, however if your images are consistently too bright or too dark, the autoexposure settings can be modified. These settings will change how bright / dark the image is, as well as the shutter speeds and gains used to capture the image.
Range
0 - 255
Recommended Value
60 (rgb), 75 (mono)
Description
Sets the average pixel value across the entire frame that the autoexposure attempts to achieve. It is the highest 8 bits of any imager, and is calculated before any ISP corrections are performed. This means that the final image will likely have an average brightness much higher than this target due to vignetting and gamma correction being applied in later steps. Due to this, in general the target value should be kept lower than 100.
Range
200 – {Shutter Max}
Recommended Value
400
Description
This value is the shortest shutter speed in us (microseconds) that will be used before the camera drops to a lower ISO. If the camera is already running at the lowest ISO, then the shutter speed will go faster until it hits the limit of the sensor.
Range
{Shutter Min} – 25000
Recommended Value
2000
Description
This value is the longest shutter speed in us (microseconds) the camera will use before increasing the ISO to attempt to stay below this value. For most flights, you should not see a longer shutter speed unless the field has insufficient lighting, forcing the shutter to go longer (see Shutter Unlock). It is recommended to keep this value lower than 3ms (3000us) to avoid motion blur caused by the groundspeed of the UAV.
Range
100 – 12800 (rgb)
100 – 25118 (mono)
Recommended Value
1600 (rgb)
1594 (mono)
Description
If the ISO gets set to this value or greater by the autoexposure, then the shutter max value is ignored, allowing the shutter speed to go slower. This is to prevent the camera from using very high gains, which can have worse effects on image quality than the motion blur from a slow shutter speed . It is also useful for taking images indoors, where lighting is insufficient to capture images otherwise.
RGB Color Adjustments
These settings allow adjustment to the overall brightness, contrast, and saturation of the image without modifying the exposure. They should be used for fine color adjustment if the default settings are not giving the quality of image needed for your application.
Range
-255.0 – 255.0
Recommended Value
-15.0
Description
Sets how bright/dark the overall image is. This value is added or subtracted from each pixel. Higher values result in the image looking more washed out, and lower values make it darker.
Range
0.0 – 2.0
Recommended Value
1.0
Description
Adjusts the difference between the light and dark values. This effectively multiplies every value by X. So setting this to 1.1 will take 1.1x each pixel value. For example, if you have a value of 20 and 200 (180 apart) normally, setting contrast to 1.1 will change the values to 22 and 220 (198 apart) effectively increasing the contrast between bright and dark.
Range
0.0 – 2.0
Recommended Value
1.0
Description
Adjusts the vibrancy of the color in the image. This will affect the color and changing this by too much can result in imagery with less ‘true’ color. This increases the ‘contrast’ of each color. For example, if something is bright green, increasing saturation adjusts it to be even more green than a darker green in the same image.
Pipeline
There are several onboard processing steps that the sensor performs to provide the best data product possible. While we recommend leaving these at their default settings, each of the processing stages can be disabled to get completely unmodified imagery from the sensor.
Recommend
Enabled
Description
This enables use of the internal color correction matrix on the sensor. The purpose is to compensate for the exact response of the sensor and produce an image with correct color and white balance. Disabling this is not recommended, as the resulting images will appear ‘greenish’ due to the sensitivity profile of the imager.
Recommend
Enabled
Description
Enables the use of gamma correction on imagery. Most software expects jpg data to have gamma correction applied, so disabling this is not recommended as the images may appear too dark for most processing.
Recommend
Enabled
Description
Enables an image sharpening algorithm to be executed on the imagery. This is done to provide “crisper” imagery with better visual separation of subject matter.
Recommend
RGB: Enabled
Monochrome: Enabled
Description
Enables onboard correction for lens vignetting effects. This is done by applying a higher gain to the corners and edges of the image where fall off effects due to the lens occur.
Recommended
Enabled
Description
Enables the onboard alignment of the monochrome imagers. This allows images flown at appropriate altitude to come off the sensor already aligned and ready for processing. This process does crop the image size by a small amount as well as translate and rotate the associated images resulting in some interpolation. If this is a concern, it can be disabled, but alignment will have to be done in other software.
