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).
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.
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 3–20 cm/px range (default: 5 cm/px).
Gyom (Weed) — Unwanted plants growing among the cultivated crop. The “Weed” preset in the vegetation index panel is tuned for detecting these.
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 photographed by P4M and M3M drones before and after each flight. Required for the reflectance calibration of vegetation indices.
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.
MRK — The file produced by DJI Phantom 4 RTK / Mavic 3 RTK drones that records the precise image timestamps and RTK-corrected positions.
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).
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.
Preset range — A pre-set threshold pair for the vegetation index, for example Stress: 0.30 – 0.65.
RTK — Real-Time Kinematic; a GNSS augmentation that delivers centimetre-accurate drone positions. Requires a ground base station or a network correction service.
Sandbox — The macOS security model that restricts apps to a defined set of folders. DroneField is sandboxed.
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.
Vegetation index — A mathematical formula combining multispectral bands (typically NIR and Red) into a single value reflecting plant condition.
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.