been pulling my hair out on this one for like two days. did a mapping mission last week over a construction site, pretty standard stuff, 75% front overlap 65% side, flew at about 100m AGL, wind was maybe 8-10 knots which isn't crazy. processed everything in DroneDeploy and the orthomosaic came back with these horizontal banding artifacts running across it. almost looks like the exposure wasn't consistent between rows but i had it set to auto exposure which i always do and it's never caused problems before.

the weird part is it only shows up in certain areas of the map, not uniformly across the whole thing. GCPs were solid, point cloud looked fine, just the final ortho has this issue. client presentation is thursday so im kind of stressed about it

anyone seen this before, any idea what causes it

that banding pattern in certain areas but not others sounds like it could be a rolling shutter issue combined with the wind. when the drone is crabbing sideways into the wind the images in those rows are getting slight geometric distortion that doesn't stitch as cleanly. some people call it the venetian blind effect. try enabling the rolling shutter correction in your processing settings if you haven't ? DroneDeploy has it buried in the advanced options somewhere.

also auto exposure over a construction site can be rough if there's a mix of dark shadows from heavy equipment and bright concrete or exposed sand. the camera might be hunting between shots and throwing off the radiometric consistency. for stuff like this i usually lock exposure manually after doing a quick pass over the site first to find a middle ground setting. bit more effort but cleaner results

ive had somthing similar happen and for me it ended up being that the SD card was writing slowly and there were a couple frames that had slight exposure lag. probably not your issue but worth checking if any of the source images look off before you blame the software. just open them in something like Lightroom and flip through the sequence, you can usually spot the weird ones pretty quick