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Abstract. Photogrammetric applications nowadays envisage the use of more and more low-cost cameras such as those equipped on commercial UAV platforms. Typically, these low-grade cameras suffer from extreme radial distortion and strong vignetting among other defects. This, initiated a trend among the low-cost cameras’ manufacturers to try to hide the camera defects by applying software pre-corrections to the images. These Built-In Correction Profiles gets applied to both the JPG files, directly in-camera, and usually to the raw files as well, through the opcode functions of the DNG standard. In this paper we rise this issue that is still under-reported in the literature and further assess the accuracy implication of applying or discarding the Built-In Correction Profile in the scenario of UAV mapping. We tested the commercial UAV DJI Phantom 4 Pro v2 in a calibration environment and a field test to compare the performance of pre-corrected versus uncorrected images. In our tests, processing the original uncorrected images led to improved IO calibration and reduced bowing effect in the field test.
Perfetti et al. (2024) studied this question.