I live in Colorado on a ridge where I am well above the surrounding area.   My understanding and expereience shows that altitude displayed on the application is actually altitude above take off point.   So when I fly out from my location it is very quickly over 100 feet off the ground but the altitude displayed remains the altitude above the take off point so it may say 10 feet when it is actually over 100 feet off the ground.   Is there any development work to provide actual altitude above the ground?

Nothing confirmed by DJI regarding the reading in the GO4 app.

Guess not for the price we pay for DJI drones
Height is a barometric height value, if DJI drone had a radar altimeter on board then yes....

cheers
JJB

The downward sensor able to provide information about the distance between aircraft and objects below. It may not the real ground high and only works on limited range. However, still able to provide information to pilot how far the obstacles below aircraft. But currently DJI Go can only show the radar information of front and rear sensor. It will be great if they can also show the radio chart of bottom sensor.

Although I have not tried, the Litchi app can do something like relative to the ground when you setup a waypoint. I think it takes the ground level from Google earth maps.

The ground level of Google map is not accurate. You need to be very careful if using that. Need to add  a lot of buffer to fly safe.

GDL Posted at 2018-6-14 18:46
The downward sensor able to provide information about the distance between aircraft and objects below. It may not the real ground high and only works on limited range. However, still able to provide information to pilot how far the obstacles below aircraft. But currently DJI Go can only show the radar information of front and rear sensor. It will be great if they can also show the radio chart of bottom sensor.

That would only work for rather short distances as it is the case with the front and rear sensors and not deliver any altitude information but only distance to ground or obstacles within something like 10 meters.

VPS is limited to 30m. Fly at 100' or higher and VPS is ineffective.

To be able to show the altitude above ground - or water for that matter - you need a (world wide) map with contour lines and current coordinates and absolute height, both of which are already provided by the AC by means of GPS.

Just fly in LOS!

Its downward vision and sonar sensors have limited range, so the drone itself isn't well equipped to report its AGL. It knows its location within a few meters, including height, via GPS. So what are the global data sets the provide ground elevation for a specific location? SRTM is probably the best public dataset. SRTM resolution is about 30m^2. Probably not useful in steep terrain. Google's elevation data is much better where I live (bloomington Indiana). I assume google's images (local to me) are captured  via aircraft equipped with cameras and LIDAR, and/or they use photogrammetry for height.

Seems doable, but accuracy would vary. Not high on my list of features.