Flagship service
Overlapping aerial imagery, processed into survey-grade point clouds, meshes and volumetric reports — the core of what LAM Geospatial does.
700,000150,000 points from one of our own survey flights — real ground, measured rather than modelled.
Carisbrooke Castle — our own flight
See it before you buy it. Twenty minutes, in person or on a call — we open a live survey in the browser, show you what it produces, and then show you the ground control and accuracy behind our own flying. You judge the method, then decide whether it is worth paying for.
Book a demonstrationHow it works
Photogrammetry rebuilds 3D geometry from ordinary photographs — and the accuracy comes as much from the method as the camera.
Overlapping stills flown in a grid pattern — typically 70–80% front and side overlap, altitude set to the ground sample distance the deliverable needs.
Software finds shared features across thousands of overlapping frames and solves each camera's position — structure-from-motion.
Multi-view stereo fills in the detail between matched points, building a dense point cloud of the whole site.
The point cloud becomes a mesh, orthomosaic, DEM/DTM or volumetric report — whichever format the job calls for.
Centimetre-accurate drone surveys are not automated outputs. They are the result of deliberate, mathematically defensible choices.
Your deliverable
A live, measurable model you open in a browser — with every underlying file supplied alongside it.
Completed datasets are delivered through our own client portal. You open the survey in a browser — pan it, measure it, section it, share it — with nothing to install and no specialist GIS or CAD licence to buy. The raw files come with it for your own workflows.
If a figure is ever questioned, it opens back to the measurement it came from. Everyone is looking at the same site.
Output formats
STRUCTURE-FROM-MOTION · RGB-COLOURED
TRIANGULATED SURFACE · OBJ/PLY
ELEVATION MODEL · CONTOUR EXPORT
STOCKPILE · CUT/FILL · EARTHWORKS
From our own survey flight
Parkland flown and processed in-house across a 6.5-hectare capture — the ground control targets are still visible in the grass.
One flight, two outputs
The same 6.5 hectares, out of the same 191 images and the same ground control. Neither is an illustration. A flat map answers where and how far; the cloud answers how high, how much and how it has changed since last time — which is why the survey produces both rather than making you choose.
Figures taken from the processing report for this flight. Project accuracy is confirmed per site — see accuracy.
Architects, planning & design
Title plans and Ordnance Survey extracts used in place of a measured survey are among the most common reasons an application fails validation — and an invalid application does not start the statutory clock.
Being sent back for a topographic survey once an application is already in costs the redesign as well as the delay. Surveyed properly at the start, the drawing goes in with the application and the levels behind it are measured rather than assumed.
TOPO TO CAD · OSGB36 / BNG · LEVELS & CONTOURS
The site and what surrounds it as a dimensionally accurate model — neighbouring ridge heights, boundary levels, tree positions and the ground your design has to sit on. Something to test a massing against, and to show a committee.
SITE CONTEXT MODEL · MESH/OBJ · MEASURED ELEVATIONS
Elevations, heights, areas and distances taken off the record months later without a return visit or a ladder — and hosted for twelve months in the price, so the consultant you bring in next can open it without buying a seat.
MEASURE LATER · 12 MONTHS HOSTED · NO SEAT TO BUY
Ground control is laid and surveyed on every job, with an independent check point held back — because the first question a planning officer or a structural engineer asks about a survey is how it was controlled. More on who we work with →
Volumetric measurement
Comparing a surveyed point cloud against a design surface or an earlier survey turns geometry into a number you can act on.
| Measurement | Method | Example output |
|---|---|---|
| Stockpile volume | Point cloud vs. ground plane | 1,240 m³ (illustrative) |
| Cut / fill | Design surface vs. as-flown surface | −860 m³ cut (illustrative) |
| Progress over time | Survey vs. previous survey | +310 m³ this period (illustrative) |
Figures above are illustrative formatting examples, not real project data.
Why drone photogrammetry
Where an aerial photogrammetric survey outperforms a conventional ground survey.
| Factor | Traditional ground survey | LAM drone photogrammetry |
|---|---|---|
| Time on site | Multiple visits, often days for larger sites | Single flight session, typically hours |
| Coverage | Discrete surveyed points and cross-sections | Continuous coverage — every square metre of the site captured |
| Repeat monitoring | A fresh visit, and cost, each time the site changes | Repeat flights overlay directly for progress and volumetric change over time |
| Equipment | Standard survey-grade instruments | DJI Matrice 4E with RTK & Emlid Reach RS4 base station |
| Accuracy | Survey-grade, dependent on method & equipment | Better than 60 mm horizontal, 44 mm RMS, measured against withheld check points — Emlid Reach RS4 ground control & RTK positioning ¹ |
| Cost driver | Scales with crew time and number of site visits | Scales with site size and deliverable complexity ² |
Get in touch
Tell us the site size, what you need measured, and the format you work in — we'll come back with a plan and a price.
Request a Quote
