okay so this has been driving me crazy for like three weeks. I'm doing a fairly large agricultural field, maybe 80 hectares, and every single time I process the flight the eastern edge of the orthomosaic comes out blurry or smeared. Not like motion blur, more like the stitching just gave up and started melting things together. The rest of the map looks totally fine.

I've reprocessed it twice in Pix4D with different settings and I get the same thing. Flew the mission again last week with more overlap on that side specifically and still the same problem. I'm starting to think it might be something about that part of the field rather than the flight or processing settings but I cant figure out what it would be. There's a small irrigation channel along that edge, not sure if that matters. Someone mentioned something about reflective surfaces messing with feature matching but I dont know enough about how photogrammetry actually works to know if thats a plausible explanation.

the irrigation channel could absolutely be causing this if theres standing water. photogrammetry relies on finding consistent visual features between overlapping images and water surfaces are basically the worst case scenario for that ? the reflections change completely depending on the sun angle between each photo so the software can't match features reliably. you end up with the algorithm either failing to tie those images together properly or making really bad guesses and that shows up as smearing or holes.

if thats whats happening there's not a ton you can do about it other than masking out that area in processing or flying at a time of day when the sun angle minimizes the glare. some people also manually add GCPs along the problem edge to force better anchor points but it depends how critical that part of the map actually is for you.

also check if theres any wind during that flight ? crops moving between images in the same overlap area can do something similar, not identical but it can look weirdly smeared especially if youre flying slow and the overlap is high enough that the same plant appears in like 8 images all in slightly different positions. what overlap settings were you running