Glossary
A collection of the most common technical terms — if something in the manual is unclear, you will probably find it explained here.
Akadály (Obstacle) — A point or small area inside the field boundary that the spray drone or tractor must avoid (tree, pole, overhead wire, well).
Along-track overlap — Overlap between consecutive images in the direction of flight. Recommended value: 75–80%.
Apple Silicon — Apple’s own ARM-based processor family (M1, M2, M3, M4). DroneField runs natively on these.
Bundle Adjustment (BA) — An optimisation procedure that refines all image positions and intrinsic camera parameters simultaneously so that the residual reprojection error of the tie points is minimised.
Boundary — See Field boundary.
Cross-track overlap — Overlap between adjacent flight lines. Recommended value: 70–75%.
CRS / coordinate reference system — The rule that maps the 3D Earth surface onto 2D coordinates. Examples: WGS84 (global GPS), EOV (Hungarian national), UTM.
Target GSD — The user-set output resolution for the final orthomosaic (cm/pixel).
DJI — The world’s largest drone manufacturer; DroneField works exclusively with DJI drone imagery.
DSM — Digital Surface Model. Elevation model of the entire visible surface (vegetation and buildings included).
Edge buffer — Application-map setting: how many grid cells the DJI / XAG prescription raster extends beyond the field boundary. The boundary file itself is unchanged, and the extra cells are not counted in area or product.
EOV — Egységes Országos Vetület (HD72 / EOV, EPSG:23700). The projection used by Hungarian government cartography.
EPSG code — An international identifier for coordinate reference systems. For example EPSG:4326 = WGS84, EPSG:23700 = EOV.
EULA — End User License Agreement; the licence terms governing the use of the software.
ExG — Excess Green index, an RGB vegetation index: 2g − r − b
(r, g, b = colour shares). Separates green plants from soil —
emergence, weed patches.
GeoTIFF — Georeferenced TIFF; a TIFF format that carries the coordinate information internally. QGIS and other GIS tools read it directly.
GIS — Geographic Information System; the family of geospatial analysis tools (QGIS, ArcGIS, Esri).
GNDVI — Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, calculated from the NIR and Green bands. More sensitive to chlorophyll content than plain NDVI.
GNSS — Global Navigation Satellite System; the umbrella term covering GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou.
GPS — Global Positioning System; the United States’ satellite navigation system. Standard GPS accuracy is ~3–5 m.
GSD — Ground Sampling Distance; the real-world ground area covered by a single pixel. At 5 cm/px GSD, every pixel covers a 5×5 cm patch on the ground. DroneField supports the 2–20 cm/px range (default: 5 cm/px).
Gyom (Weed) — Unwanted plants growing among the cultivated crop.
Heartbeat — A small ping the desktop application sends every 15 minutes to let the portal know the device is online and active.
HD72 — Hungarian Datum 72; the geodetic datum underlying the EOV projection.
ISOXML — ISO 11783-10 standard; the common file format used by precision-agriculture machinery (John Deere, Case, Claas, Fendt) to exchange task data.
Calibration panel — A white / grey reference panel that some multispectral workflows photograph before and after each flight. DroneField does not use or require it: reflectance is computed from the drone’s sunlight sensor (irradiance) data, with vignetting and sensor-gain (SensorGainAdjustment) correction.
Application map (VRA) — Variable Rate Application map; the field divided into zones with a different application rate (chemical, seed, fertiliser) per zone.
KML — Keyhole Markup Language; XML-based geospatial file format (originally Google Earth’s). Many agricultural software products support it.
KMZ — The zipped variant of KML.
Lawnmower pattern — A flight pattern of parallel back-and-forth strips. DroneField’s processing pipeline is optimised for this layout.
Live threshold — Application-map setting used with Living share: pixels at or above this index value count as living plants. Computed automatically from the field’s own pixels; can be overridden.
Living share — Application-map zoning mode: each grid cell is zoned by the percentage of its area above the live threshold (alive), instead of by its mean index.
Min. valid share — Application-map setting (Mean index zoning): the share of a cell’s pixels that must fall within the pixel filter for the cell to be zoned by its average. Cells below it go to the lowest treated zone or the untreated zone.
MRK — The file produced by DJI RTK drones (e.g. Phantom 4 RTK, Mavic 3 Enterprise / Multispectral) that records the precise image timestamps and RTK-corrected positions. Recommended, but not required — without it DroneField uses the photos’ GPS tags.
MS index — The vegetation index layer of a multispectral project (NDVI, GNDVI, NDRE, EVI, VARI). See also RGB index.
NIR — Near Infrared; the spectral band around ~840 nm. The key input for vegetation indices.
NDVI — Normalized Difference Vegetation Index; the most classical
vegetation index. Formula: (NIR - R) / (NIR + R).
NDRE — Normalized Difference Red Edge index, from the NIR and Red Edge bands. The best index for dense, mature stands (corn, wheat).
NGRDI — Normalized Green-Red Difference Index, an RGB vegetation
index: (G − R) / (G + R). Shows green vs. yellow / brown —
yellowing, desiccation.
Onboarding — The new-user introduction flow (register → download → install → subscribe).
OpenStreetMap (OSM) — The world’s largest community-built map (osm.org). DroneField supports it as an alternative basemap provider.
Orthomosaic — A single seamless, orthorectified (perspective-corrected) image stitched from many aerial photos. The main deliverable of a drone survey.
Orthorectification — The process that removes the distortion caused by terrain and camera tilt, yielding a map-quality flat image.
P4M — DJI Phantom 4 Multispectral; the older multispectral platform, from 2018.
P4R — DJI Phantom 4 RTK; a high-resolution RGB survey drone.
Pixel — The smallest element of a digital image. GSD describes the physical size of one pixel on the ground.
Pixel filter — Application-map setting (Mean index zoning): only pixels within this index range count in a cell’s average and in the Min. valid share. Independent of the vegetation index panel’s display range, which only colours the map.
Preset range — A pre-set threshold pair for the vegetation index, for example Stress: 0.10 – 0.30. Available in multispectral projects only.
RGB index — The vegetation index layer computed from the RGB orthomosaic (VDVI, NGRDI, ExG, plus VARI in RGB-only projects) — available with any supported drone, generated on first use.
RTK — Real-Time Kinematic; a GNSS augmentation that delivers centimetre-accurate drone positions. Requires a ground base station or a network correction service.
SHP / Shapefile — ESRI Shapefile; the most common vector GIS
format. A package of multiple files (.shp, .shx, .dbf, .prj, …).
3D Map — The smooth 3D terrain view of a processed field, with the orthomosaic or NDVI draped over the surface. It replaces the earlier point-cloud viewer. See 3D Map.
Field boundary — The outer polygon on the map that delineates the survey or spraying target area.
Tie point — A point feature identified on two or more images as representing the same physical point. The basis of bundle adjustment.
TASKDATA — The root folder name on the USB stick that ISOXML tractor terminals look for.
VDVI — Visible-band Difference Vegetation Index, an RGB vegetation
index: (2G − R − B) / (2G + R + B). General greenness; the default
index in RGB-only projects.
Vegetation index — A mathematical formula combining image bands into a single value reflecting plant condition — multispectral indices (e.g. NDVI from NIR and Red) or RGB indices (e.g. VDVI) from the visible colours of the orthomosaic.
VIES — VAT Information Exchange System; the EU VAT-number validation database. DroneField uses it during checkout to apply reverse charge to EU business customers.
VRA — Variable Rate Application; see Application map.
WGS84 — World Geodetic System 1984; the reference for GPS and most modern maps (EPSG:4326).
XAG — A Chinese manufacturer of agricultural drones (P40, P100, V40). DroneField provides a dedicated export format for them.
XMP — Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform; the metadata standard DJI drones use inside the JPEG image headers.
Zone buffer — Application-map setting that expands the treated zones into the untreated ones — typically about half the swath width.