Airborne urban mapping made easy
Ruedi Wagner
Leica Geosystems Vice-President for Airborne Imaging
Anders Ekelund
Leica Geosystems Vice-President for Airborne LiDAR
Cities are rapidly changing and data needs are identified for a large number of applications.
The current best practice for 3D City Modelling is to use a penta oblique imaging system, such as the Leica RCD 30 Penta Oblique, together with various software workflow solutions. Typical products currently delivered are city digital terrain models (DTM) / digital surface models (DSM), aerial imaging, point clouds, ortho photos, building footprints, 3D city models and 3D city meshes. Sole oblique airborne image data have a number of limitations for the automatic city-modelling workflow. This is primary caused by the limitation of image technology itself, such as it is not possible to see through vegetation, bad image quality in shadow areas, image occlusions, or aerial triangulation mismatch on homogenous surfaces (e.g. water surfaces). For the end product, this typically leads to meltdown of building edges and errors in surfaces, which disturbs the automatic algorithms for 3D city modelling and labor intensive manual editing is needed. Due to these limitations Leica Geosystems has developed a fused airborne LiDAR and oblique image sensor, CityMapper, and a fused image and LiDAR work flow, RealCity, specifically for city mapping needs. This presentation will cover the CityMapper / RealCity solution in detail and provide real-world examples.
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Track 1: Airborne urban mapping made easy
Track 2: Digital Reality Management – An update on Leica Geosystems HDS software and a vision into the future
Track 3: Centralising all monitoring information to a single serve for fast decisions – The latest innovations from Leica GeoMoS