Using the magic wand to speed up your analysis

Who can use this feature

Owners and editors with a Professional or Pro + subscription

Often when we capture drone mapping data, we are doing so to identify features and their locations, and to measure distances, areas, and volumes. To measure the area of something (e.g. tree cover), we need to generate a polygon around its edges.

In GeoNadir, there are two different ways to do this - manually trace the feature using the polygon, rectangle, or circle tool; or the magic wand, which uses AI to detect feature boundaries.

Zoom to a level where you can clearly see your feature of interest.
From the top menu bar, click on the magic wand tool (shortcut 'W')
Left click on the map with your mouse to select one or more samples of the features you want to map.
Sometimes it is helpful to also select samples of 'background' features that you don't want to include. Hold shift and click the map to select background samples.
If you make a mistake, hold alt and click on a sample to remove it.
When you have at least one sample, you can preview the result. Either click preview in the magic wand pop up, or press enter on your keyboard.
If you are happy with the result, click save in the magic wand pop up, or press enter once again on your keyboard.
Your polygons will appear in your table of contents and on the map. You can then go ahead and edit these as normal.
To add magic wand polygons to an existing polygon layer, make sure that your 'recipient' layer is selected on the ToC.

Keyboard shortcuts - summary

W - open magic wand
Shift + click- select background samples
Alt + click - remove a sample
Enter - preview the objects, and then once the preview has been run, this will also save the objects to the table of contents
Esc - click once to reset the samples, and then click again to return to the pan hand to navigate
Space bar - hold to temporarily enact the pan hand
Left, right, up, down arrow keys - move the map in that direction
Pg up, pg dn, home, end - move the map in that direction by a full screen display
Plus and minus - zoom in, zoom out

Top tips

Get used to using the keyboard short cuts - this will significantly reduce your time analyzing.
Don't worry if you can't get the automatic detection perfect - you can always edit the polygons after you commit them to the map and ToC. Delete what you don't need, and the union tool is helpful to merge overlapping shapes together.
Objects will only be detected on the visible area of the screen. So you may need to pan around your data and do multiple detections.
Objects will be detected on the visible data - this means that contrast enhancement and transparency will affect your result.
Zoom out to detect larger features (e.g. forest), zoom in to detect smaller features (e.g. trees).
You can even run detections on the basemap!

Release notes