Four year report of ISPRS WG II/1

In the past four years, the working group has achieved its goal set in the terms of reference. The major highlights of its achievements include:

Ÿ Contributed to a mobile mapping session at GIS/LIS 97 including papers on land-based, airborne and satellite (1m) real-time mapping topics.

Ÿ Contributed to Duane C. Brown International Summer School on Geomatics in June 1998, Columbus, OH.

Ÿ Organized two sessions on real-time mapping technology at the Commission II Symposium at Cambridge UK, July 14- 17, 1998.

Ÿ Organized an International Workshop on Mobile Mapping Technology at Bangkok in April 1999. The workshop was very well attended and has a significant influence on future research and development of real-time mapping technologies. It brought together 190 participants from 17 countries for 42 oral presentations in 12 sessions and 18 posters.

Ÿ There will be two sessions (IC-10 and TCII-04) and one poster session (TPII-01) at ISPRS Congress in Amsterdam 2000 on real-time mapping and related topics chaired by the working group.

Ÿ The working group will be co-organizing the 3^rd International Symposium on Mobile Mapping Technology in Cairo, Egypt in January 2001, co-sponsored by ISPRS, IAG, and FIG

Recent trend in this area can be summarized by the following:

In addition to GPS, INS and CCD cameras, integration of laser, SAR and hyper-spectral sensors is becoming evidently advantageous in applications where not only real-time but also all-weather and high accuracy is essential. Research in multisensor and multiplatform based sensor integration and data processing will be an important topic in the next few years. Its applications can be found in emergency management, environmental monitoring, and others.

Great efforts have been made in high-accurate real-time navigation data using radio-link based local DGPS correction techniques for a broader range of applications. It will greatly improve the real-time positional accuracy of sensor orientation. Supported by this development and along with the progress in GPS/INS integration, real-time accurate sensor orientation will soon be a reality in some parts of the world.

Intelligent processing of mobile mapping data remains a research topic. The knowledge of camera orientation and possible object models in the object space can be very helpful for feature extraction as well as for object recognition. Multiple image based matching has found its application in the mobile mapping processing. Bayesian networks have been actively researched and promise great potential for feature extraction. The application of invariance theory for sensor orientation and georeferencing in cases of weak navigation data has attracted attention. Object recognition and feature extraction will benefit from the availability of high quality orientation parameters and image sequential information. Algorithms for automatic data processing such as model-based object recognition, multiple image-based matching, Hopfield and Bayesian networks have found applications in the mobile mapping data processing.