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theRmalUAV

1. Overview

The goal of theRmalUAV is to clean and correct raw thermal UAV data.

There are two workflows that can be followed:

  1. Image-based Workflow: to perform corrections at image level
  2. Orthomosaic-based Workflow: to perform corrections on an orthomosaic containing uncorrected at-sensor temperatures

2. Installation

theRmalUAV

theRmalUAV is not on CRAN (yet). You can install the development version of theRmalUAV from GitHub:

Note: Windows users need RTools to build packages from source files (which is basically what you do when you install from GitHub). RTools is not a R package, rather its a set of utilities that you install separately. You can download and install RTools from https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/. Alternately, you can install RTools from within R by running:

install.packages('installr')
installr::install.Rtools()

After RTools is installed, you can install theRmalUAV from GitHub

## install.packages('remotes')
remotes::install_github("christophemetsu/theRmalUAV")

Dependent Packages

theRmalUAV requires several dependent packages, including fs, progress, rmarkdown, svDialogs, terra, tiff, and others (see the DESCRIPTION file for a complete list). Normally missing packages are installed at the same time, but if you get an error message about a missing package(s), install the dependent packages separately (i.e., from the ‘Packages’ pane in RStudio) then run remotes::install_github(“christophemetsu/theRmalUAV”, dependencies=FALSE).

exiftool

To read the EXIF data from the image files, theRmalUAV requires an external command line tool called ‘exiftool’.

UPDATE: As of version 1.6.0, you no longer need to manually install the exiftool command line utility. Rather you can install by running:

exiftoolr::install_exiftool()

To verify it worked:

exiftoolr::exif_version()
#> Using ExifTool version 12.50
#> [1] "12.50"

Alternately, you can install exiftool manually by downloading it from http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/. Be sure to unzip it to a folder on the path (e.g, c:) and rename the executable file from exiftool(-k).exe to exiftool.exe.

3. Supported thermal sensors

To obtain a table of available thermal sensor which you can use, run tuav_cameras() with no argument. If your sensor is not listed, you may submit an issue on GitHub to have it added. For details see the help page (?tuav_cameras) or contact the package author.

4. Citation

If you use theRmalUAV, please cite:

Metsu, C., Maes, W.H., Ottoy, S., Van Meerbeek, K. (2026). theRmalUAV: An R package to clean and correct thermal UAV data for accurate land surface temperatures. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 17(2), pp. 488–496. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.70196.