home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Digital Orthophoto Production FLOPPY Disk Readme File
-
-
-
- An orthophoto is by definition "a photographic reproduction
-
- prepared from a perspective photograph in which the displacement
-
- of images due to camera tilt and terrain relief have been
-
- removed" (Manual of Photogrammetry 1966). For the sake of
-
- completeness the definition may be expanded to include "so that
-
- the orthophoto has the same metric accuracy as a map and it also
-
- has a uniform scale."
-
- The basic equipment used to make a digital orthophoto is a
-
- scanning microdensitometer and a digital computer. A scanning
-
- microdensitometer is a precision instrument that uniformly scans
-
- a photograph in a rectilinear fashion so that the designated area
-
- is completely covered by adjacent picture elements (pixels) of
-
- the desired size. A single numerical value is assigned to each
-
- pixel proportional to the photon flux at that point (Horton
-
- 1978). The entire aerial photograph is digitized resulting in a
-
- volume of data of from 20 million bytes to slightly over 80-
-
- million bytes. The computer required to process these large data
-
- sets must be fast, have a large random access memory (RAM),
-
- and have large data storage devices.
-
- The input data needed for generating a digital orthophoto
-
- include: digitized image, a digital elevation model (DEM), and
-
- both exterior and interior image orientation parameters. At this
-
- time the digital orthophoto is made using many conventional
-
- procedures. Control for the aerial photograph is developed
-
- by aerotriangulation methods and is transferred to the
-
- diapositive to be scanned. The diapositive is placed on the
-
- microdensitometer and digitized, the digital data being written
-
- to tape. The data is then processed using the software developed
-
- by the USGS.
-
- The software solves the exterior orientation of the
-
- photograph by using space resection (collinearity) equations.
-
- Next, raster fiducials are fit to the calibrated camera fiducials
-
- using a linear conformal transformation and the transformation
-
- parameters are saved.
-
- The first two profiles of the digital elevation model (DEM)
-
- are input to form a profile pair of DEM cells. The photo
-
- coordinates of the cell corners in the raster system are computed
-
- using DEM cell corner coordinates. The DEM cell is then
-
- subdivided into the desired resolution. The raster coordinate
-
- (line and sample) of each subdivision is then computed to the
-
- nearest integer using bilinear transformation parameters. For
-
- each subdivision the 8-bit binary grey scale value that
-
- corresponds to the raster coordinate is assigned to a subdivision
-
- image coordinate. The processing of each cell in a profile pair
-
- and of each profile pair is accomplished sequentially.
-
- The result of this program is a digital orthophoto that can
-
- be used as an image map base in a graphic display system or
-
- written to film to form a hardcopy orthophoto.
-
- The digital orthophoto on this disk is the southwest quarter
-
- of the Black Earth SW, WI quarter quadrangle. The area covered
-
- is approximately 1.875-minutes with a ground resolution for each
-
- pixel of 3.75-meters. The orthophoto is cast on North American
-
- Datum of 1983 (NAD 83) in Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM)
-
- zone 16. The UTM coordinates of the northwest corner are:
-
- X = 275670.0 meters
-
- Y = 4781265.0 meters.
-
- The radiometric resolution is 8-bits and the file contains 1,000
-
- lines of 1,000 samples each. There is no header i.e., header
-
- bytes = 0.
-
- All instructions to display the image are explained in the
-
- ASCII file IMDISP.DOC. Although this program has been used by
-
- the U.S. Geological Survey, no warranty, expressed or implied, is
-
- made by the USGS as to accuracy and functioning of the program
-
- and related program material nor shall the fact of distribution
-
- constitute such warranty, and no responsibility is assumed by the
-
- USGS in connection herewith. Users should use care in judging
-
- the quality of the image for specific applications. Poor image
-
- resolution may be due to low resolution monitors commonly found
-
- on personal computers.
-