okay this has been driving me crazy for two weeks. doing a vineyard survey, about 14 hectares, flying at 80m with 80/70 overlap front and side. mavic 3 classic, processing in DroneDeploy. the ortho comes out with these faint horizontal stripes running across it, pretty evenly spaced, lines up roughly with the flight lines i think.

i tried reprocessing twice and they're still there. lighting was pretty even that day, flew around 10am so no harsh shadows. GCPs were placed but only 4 of them because its a rural site and getting out there takes forever. not sure if thats related.

someone told me it might be the camera calibration but i dont really know how to check that in DD, it doesnt expose that much of the processing pipeline. do i need to move to something like Pix4D where i can actually tweak things, or is there something basic im missing

classic doming or stripeing issue, usually comes down to either not enough GCPs or the overlap isnt quite what you think it is at the edges. 4 GCPs over 14ha is pretty thin, you really want them distributed not just at corners and the general rule ive seen is one every 3-4ha on flat ground more on complex terrain. also worth checking if your drone was actually hitting the programmed altitude ? if theres any variation in actual flight height you get inconsistent scale across strips and it shows up exactly like you're describing.

ive seen this exact thing and for me it turned out to be rolling shutter. the mavic 3 classic has a mechanical shutter option and i wasnt using it, switching to that basically made the artifacts disappear on my next flight. might not be your issue but worth ruling out before you go down the GCP rabbit hole. also DroneDeploy does have a camera optimization setting buried somewhere in the advanced processing menu, i forget exactly where but it helped a bit when i had calibration weirdness