BSF Swissphoto’s plane sits at the ready at an airport in Lelystad.
Indeed, with the routine procurement of airborne imagery, the ICC members are living proof of the benefits of one of the organization’s mottos: “Acquire aerial photos once, use them multiple times.” “The need for up-to-date, fit for purpose geo-information has steadily grown in recent years,” says Leon Hendriks, the ICC’s program man - ager. “Historically, this data hasn’t been easy to obtain for individual organizations in the Schiphol Region because of their proximity to the airport and access restrictions. Since 2009, the ICC has been able to coordinate one aerial campaign to serve multiple users within the Region. With these brilliant, accurate and data-rich orthophotos our members have the spatial intelligence to better plan for city and rural development, monitor their landscapes, respond to permitting requests and appeals and communicate to the public. It’s been a very successful program and one we plan to continue for the foreseeable future.” That future has already begun. BSF Swissphoto took to the skies in mid-February to initiate the 2020 Vertical Aerial Photo campaign, and will again be producing seamless orthomosaics for the participating ICC members in its AOI. Anchored by its smart approach to flying in combination with its image processing software, BSF Swissphoto may have the tailwind to land more airborne surveys in the future.
“We’ve been using Inpho technology since 2005 and so far, we haven’t found any solution better than OrthoMaster and OrthoVista for creating ortho products,” says Beckmann. After completing all the orthomosaics, BSF Swissphoto personnel then prepared the customized deliverables. Per the ICC’s requirements, they not only finalized all 17 orthomosaics, but for each city, they selected all the ortho tiles belonging to each city’s territory and formatted each as a TIFF file, enabling them to provide both the seamless mosaic and the corresponding individual tiles to each customer. Within 11 weeks of completing the aerial survey, each of the ICC cities had received their up-to-date orthomosaic for 2019. “We wouldn’t have been able to process and transform 30,000 photos into real-world, color-balanced and seamless 2D orthomosaics in 11 short weeks without the automation and accuracy of the Inpho soft- ware and a strong team,” says Beckmann. “The clarity and detail these orthomosaics provide will be a valuable geospatial dataset for ICC participants.” The Kreekrak locks in the Scheldt-Rhine Canal, which runs from Antwerp to the Volkerak and is part of the Scheldt-Rhine connection, the shipping route between Antwerp and Rotterdam.
MARY JO WAGNER is a Freelance Writer, Editor, and Media Consultant based in Vancouver, BC. She can be reached at mj_wagner@shaw.ca.
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september 2020
csengineermag.com
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