THE ULTRACAM STORY
The UltraCam-project created a novel <i>Large Format Digital Aerial Camera</i>. It was inspired by the ISPRS Congress 2000 in Amsterdam. The search for a promising imaging idea succeeded in May 2001, defining a tiling approach with multiple lenses and multiple area CCD arrays to assemble...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Copernicus Publications
2012-07-01
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| Series: | The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences |
| Online Access: | https://www.int-arch-photogramm-remote-sens-spatial-inf-sci.net/XXXIX-B1/39/2012/isprsarchives-XXXIX-B1-39-2012.pdf |
| Summary: | The UltraCam-project created a novel <i>Large Format Digital Aerial Camera</i>. It was inspired by the ISPRS Congress 2000 in Amsterdam. The search for a promising imaging idea succeeded in May 2001, defining a tiling approach with multiple lenses and multiple area CCD arrays to assemble a seamless and geometrically stable monolithic photogrammetric aerial large format image. First resources were spent on the project in September 2011. The initial UltraCam-D was announced and demonstrated in May 2003. By now the imaging principle has resulted in a 4th generation UltraCam Eagle, increasing the original swath width from 11,500 pixels to beyond 20,000. Inspired by the original imaging principle, alternatives have been investigated, and the UltraCam-G carries the swath width even further, namely to a frame image with nearly 30,000 pixels, however, with a modified tiling concept and optimized for orthophoto production.
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We explain the advent of digital aerial large format imaging and how it benefits from improvements in computing technology to cope with data flows at a rate of 3 Gigabits per second and a need to deal with Terabytes of imagery within a single aerial sortie. We also address the many benefits of a transition to a fully digital workflow with a paradigm shift away from minimizing a project's number of aerial photographs and towards maximizing the automation of photogrammetric workflows by means of high redundancy imaging strategies. The instant gratification from near-real-time aerial triangulations and dense image matching has led to a reassessment of the value of photogrammetric point clouds to successfully compete with direct point cloud measurements by LiDAR. |
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| ISSN: | 1682-1750 2194-9034 |