New Possibilities in Digitizing Aerial Images

Most larger municipalities or government agencies as well as many privately owned companies from the geodata sector own a large archive of aerial imagery on film. These archives contain a value of many ten thousands of dollars which is hardly used or recognized. Today's scanning technology together with up to date software tools and data storage systems make possible a much higher scanning resolution than only few years ago. Where at that time a resolution of only 25µm produced far too much data to handle, now one can easily achieve a resolution of even 10µm without any issues. That means more than twice the resolution possible before.

What does that mean? Scanning your archive of aerial images (or scanning it anew) opens up a whole range of possibilities. Images are digitized with an incredibly high resolution which was not available before. They can be evaluated with nowadays cutting edge software solutions to produce valuable 2D and 3D vector data even from historical images. Digital ortho images can be re-produced with a much higher resolution than what possible in the past and become available for a multitude of visualizations or evaluations. Images can now be accessed in a GIS database instead of having to look through many shelves with heavy film. They can easily be copied and secured on data carriers to prevent the loss of valuable imagery for instance in case of accidents or fire.

GTA Geoinformatik GmbH offers professional digitizing services with the high resolution precision scanner DSW 700 (Leica Geosystems) at very competitive prices. The scanner uses a CCD camera that has a CCD sensing area of 4000 x 2700 pixels, handling cut film as well as roll film. With a geometrical precision of 1.5 µm per axis the scanner works with aerial images (color, color infrared, black and white, positive and negative) with a maximum size of 260 x 260 mm. Available data formats are VITec, Sun Raster, plain raster, TIFF, tiled TIFF, NITF, JPG2000.

Internet: www.gta-geo.de
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