Much like with the Creating arbitrary 3D objects for PostGIS recipe, we will be taking an image series and converting it into a point cloud. In this case, however, our image series will be from UAV imagery. Download the image series included in the code folder for this chapter, uas_flight, and feed it into VisualSFM (check http://ccwu.me/vsfm/for more information on how to use this tool); in order to retrieve a point cloud, name it uas_points.ply (this file is also included in this folder in case you would rather use it).
The input for PostGIS is the same as before. Create a JSON file and use PDAL store it into the database:
{
"pipeline": [{
"type": "readers.ply",
"filename": "/data/uas_flight/uas_points.ply"
}, {
"type": "writers.pgpointcloud",
"connection": "host='localhost' dbname='postgis-cookbook' user='me'
password='me' port='5432'",
"table": "uas",
"schema": "chp07"
}]
}