I work in mining and wanted to share a bit of context on what police might mean when they talk about the “special drone with infrared capabilities” and why they’ve said it could take weeks to analyse.
In our industry we use LiDAR and other survey tech to scan and compare terrain over time. Even a relatively small scan area produces a massive dataset, hundreds of millions of data points and sometimes hundreds of gigabytes in size. Once the point cloud is processed we can overlay it with previous scans or base survey data to detect subtle changes on the surface.
It’s incredibly accurate. You can pick up small depressions, new wheel tracks, compacted soil, or areas that have been dug or filled. When vegetation is sparse, like out there, the ground reads very cleanly. A few millimetres of change over a large area can be mapped out once the data is filtered and modelled.
That’s why it’s described as quite complex technology. They’re not talking about infrared to pick up heat signatures ten days later, that wouldn’t be useful now. What they’re doing is using multispectral or LiDAR-type imagery to look for disturbed earth or any physical surface change that doesn’t match the baseline.
The analysis takes time because every grid of data has to be reviewed, filtered, and compared. It’s slow detailed work but it can show things the human eye would never catch from the ground or a helicopter.
I’ve attached an example from a low precision LiDAR terrain scan I have been working on, not from the search area. Even at low resolution you can still make out roads, small depressions, and compacted areas. You can imagine how high resolution police data would reveal far more detail.
In simple terms they’re not searching for Gus directly with this drone tech, they’re scanning for evidence of disturbance, areas where the ground tells a story. Once that analysis is complete it could guide them to where to look next.
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