Mapping Capability of a Low Cost Aerial Data Acquisition Platform – First Results

Based on a first prototype, an improved low-cost aerial platform was developed at the Institute of Digital Image Processing in order to be used for immediate acquisition and processing of image data wherever necessary. Typically, such requirements arise in case of natural hazards, where the amount of renvironmental or infrastructural damage has to be rapidly assessed and quantified. In general, the platform comprises a camera as well as GPS and IMU instruments in order to record the position and orientation of the camera. Using a helicopter, first campaigns have been flown with this platform over various urban and sub-urban test sites in Vienna and Graz in order to map buildings, or – more generally - to create digital surface models. Ground control points were measured and used for these test sites to perform aero-triangulation via block adjustment, and to estimate and validate the potential accuracy with respect to 3D mapping. In this paper, pilot mapping applications are presented, which refer to interactive 3D building extraction using photogrammetric workstation software on the one hand, and widely automated surface model generation using image matching procedures applied to multiple image data on the other hand.