Drone flight in. Bare earth out.
DirtWorks' in-house photogrammetry engine.
Quantities are only as good as the ground.
Off-the-shelf photogrammetry is tuned for pretty maps. Earthwork needs a surface you can take to a pay application: ground control first, every point classified, vegetation stripped, and the result checked against the design model in the cab. Hummingbird is built around that one requirement — the most accurate bare-earth surface we can produce, even when it costs run time.
It runs on DirtWorks' own GPU hardware, from import through delivery, with no per-project cloud processing fees passed through to you.
Ground control drives everything
Painted targets, measured with RTK. The GCPs govern georeferencing and bundle adjustment; PPK refines camera positions when it's there. Output in your coordinate system, with the geoid applied.
Classification, not just a point cloud
Full LAS class codes after the dense cloud: ground, vegetation by density, road, concrete, walls, debris. A deep-learning point segmentation model trained on our own sites, corrected and retrained as we go.
Trees, cover, objects
Per-tree records with height and crown, a vegetation density raster that tells grass from brush from trees, stockpile and object outlines — the inputs to a clear-and-grub number.
Engineering deliverables, and the showy one.
Bare-earth DTM + TIN
LandXML / DXF ready for your design software and machine control. Existing-ground layers in your standard colors.
Classified LAZ / COPC
The full point cloud with class codes, streamed in the browser from Hive or downloaded whole.
Orthomosaic + DSM
Cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs that open anywhere and tile instantly on the Hive map.
Accuracy + site analysis
Check-point residuals, cover acreage, tree list, stockpile volumes. Numbers with their uncertainty.
Gaussian splat
A photoreal 3D model of the site you can send as a link. For the owner's meeting, not the pay app.
Straight into Hive
Every finished job publishes to Hive as a dated flight on its site. Compare it against the last flight or the design model the same afternoon.
Typical flight
5–40 acres, 100–400 images, an RTK survey drone. Ground control on painted targets, checked against independent points.
Fly. Process. Deliver.
We fly the site, Hummingbird runs the whole chain automatically — alignment, control, dense cloud, classification, surfaces, analysis, export — and the deliverable lands in Hive with the originals attached. Progress flights repeat the same recipe so the numbers are comparable month to month.
Not survey equipment. Phone positions and every reading, grade, quantity and estimate are approximate: check them against project control and a licensed surveyor or engineer before you build, stake, bid or pay. See the Terms.
Two ways to use it: fly your own drone and send us the photo folder (Hummingbird, priced per photo, with an instant estimate on the pricing page), or have us fly the site for you (Site Scan, priced by the acre).
Need a surface you can trust?
Send the site address and what you need measured. We'll scope the flight, ground control and deliverables.