Software and citation
Documentation · what DEDAL is made of, and how to cite it.
Components
Developed for DEDAL
| dedal-calibration | Reflectance calibration of DJI Mavic 3M images, panel detection, quality checks, panel files; used by the web platform and the cluster pipeline. Python, MIT licence. Released on Zenodo: doi:10.5281/zenodo.23286715 (v0.1.0; all versions: doi:10.5281/zenodo.23286714). |
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| Panel calibration plugin | WebODM plugin: the calibration box, per-user panels and thresholds, the calibration result on each task, and the delivery of the camera's factory lens to the processing nodes. |
| DEDAL Extraction plugin | WebODM plugin: plots auto-fitted to the imagery, grids, whole field, imported layouts (GeoJSON, shapefile, KML) and plot sheets; per-plot indices, reflectance and heights. Plot tools shared with the JIC Drone Imagery Data portal. |
| QGIS Integration | Ready-made QGIS projects of each flight (orthophoto, NDVI, surface model, plots, styled), made by the DEDAL Extraction plugin. |
| DEDAL-Lab | On-demand RStudio sessions with FIELDimageR.Extra, launched from WebODM, with a flight and its plots copied in and a starter analysis script. |
| DEDAL website | Accounts (academic and farmer), guide and documentation, WebODM theme. |
| Cluster pipeline | Nextflow pipeline on the JIC cluster: calibration, OpenDroneMap and products for whole seasons, unattended, with the same settings as the web platform. |
Built on (third-party, open source)
| OpenDroneMap | ODM 3.6 (photogrammetry), WebODM 2.5 (web interface), NodeODM and ClusterODM (processing nodes). AGPL-3.0. opendronemap.org |
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| FIELDimageR.Extra | R package for plot analysis of orthomosaics, in DEDAL-Lab. GitHub |
| RStudio Server | In DEDAL-Lab (rocker images). |
| Python libraries | NumPy, SciPy, Pillow (calibration); rasterio, Shapely, pyproj, pyshp, openpyxl (extraction); Flask (website). |
DEDAL is not officially associated with OpenDroneMap or its products.
How to cite
- DEDAL: Gonzalez Sanchez M., Vickers M., Steuernagel B., John Innes Centre (2025). DEDAL, Distributed Ecosystem for Drone Analytics in Life-sciences (poster, MONOGRAM 2025). Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.15846333
- The calibration: Gonzalez Sanchez M., Vickers M., Steuernagel B. dedal-calibration: reflectance calibration of DJI Mavic 3M multispectral images (v0.1.0). John Innes Centre. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.23286715. Methods text: Calibration method.
- OpenDroneMap, for the photogrammetry: OpenDroneMap/ODM.
- FIELDimageR.Extra, if you use DEDAL-Lab: Pawar P. & Matias F.I. (2023), The Plant Phenome Journal, doi:10.1002/ppj2.20083.
Please also tell us about your publication (dedal@jic.ac.uk): it helps us keep DEDAL running.
Versions
Results depend on the software versions. DEDAL records them: the calibration version and settings in each task's calibration record, and the OpenDroneMap version in its processing report. The calibration method is version 0.1.0 (October 2026); changes are listed in its changelog.