The UltraCam Large Format Aerial Digital Camera System
The American Society for Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing Annual Convention, 2003
The race is on to introduce an aerial digital camera system to outperform the current aerial film cameras in quality, accuracy and economics. We introduce the UltraCam-D large format digital aerial camera. It achieves superiority over conventional aerial film imaging. The system produces aerial "photography" as if a film camera had taken film images that then were scanned. As a result, images that get produced by the novel camera will feed into a current softcopy photogrammetry workflow without significant changes, yet with many advantages. These include quality advantages with superior radiometry and geometric stability resulting from the use of CCD technology. There are cost advantages due to the avoidance of film and scanning. Finally there are operational advantages due to instant quality control, image based navigational support reducing the need for imaging skills, and very short repeat intervals in the range of 0.75 seconds, optionally producing very high forward overlaps at no added cost. The technical specifications of the camera meet the requirement that it outperform a modern film camera system.