Case Study: Aerial Eye digitally preserves Clifden Castle with Pix4D drone mapping

Reconstructing heritage assets in Ireland with drones

Aerial Eye, an aerial photography and filming company in Ireland, wanted to demonstrate to archaeologists how drone photogrammetry could be used to record and digitally preserve heritage sites, starting with Clifden Castle in County Galway. Using Pix4D’s Pix4Dmapper, the team aimed to create a highly detailed 3D reconstruction that could support cultural heritage documentation more effectively than traditional photo records.

Pix4D helped Aerial Eye produce a detailed 3D model from 214 images captured over a 1.3-hectare site at 1.2 cm GSD, flown manually with a DJI Inspire 1 in nadir and oblique passes. The result was a model the client found superior to previous software outputs, and the archaeologist was impressed by both the speed and effectiveness of the workflow. Pix4D’s approach provided a faster, cheaper way to visually record the castle, with potential for future use in education, annotation, and a larger 3D database of Ireland’s historic assets.