PE&RS June 1999

Cover Image

Applanix’s integrated inertial/GPS Position and Orientation System for Airborne Vehicles (POS/AV) has found a wide range of applications with airborne sensors. One of the more interesting ones is airborne laser scanning. In order to remove the aircraft motion-induced geo-metric distortion effects and provide precise geographical coordinates of the ground data, the position and orientation of each laser pulse must be precisely measured, time-aligned and recorded. This process results in high-accuracy Digital Terrain Models (DTM) that can be turned around in a matter of hours.

The DTM on the front cover of the June 1999 issue of PE&RS is of the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. The image was obtained using Optech’s ALTM 1210 — 10 kI-lz, and Applanix’s POS/AV at 2000m AGL. There are four separate flight lines tied together to create this image, which consists of 350,000 points and took two minutes to collect. The elevation accuracy is better than 10 cm.

For further information on POS/AV, contact Applanix Corporation at 905-475-2221, info@applanix.com, or www.applanix.com. For additional information on ALTM, contact Jim Green at Optech Inc., 416-661-5904, jimg@optech.on.ca, or (http://www.optech.on.ca) www.optech.on.ca.

Peer-Reviewed Articles (Click the linked titles to see the full abstract)

667 C-Factor for Softcopy Photogrammetry
Donald L. Light

Typical soft C-factors for digital photogrammetric workstations, assuming standard aerial photography and different scan spot sizes, are in a range from 800 to 2200.

671 Nonlinear Trackers Using Image-Dependent Gains
D.D. Sworder, J.E. Boyd, G.A. Clapp, and R. Vojak

The performance of a nonlinear, dual-sensor algorithm is contrasted with sophisticated radar-only algorithms, and it is shown that sensor utilization can be expanded significantly with a dual-sensor estimation approach.

679 Comparison of NOAA/NASA PAL and NOAA GVI Data for Vegetation Change Studies over China
Stephen S. Young and Assaf Anyamba

Principal Components Analysis of the data indicate that sensor-related problems remain in the PAL data, though not as severely as in the GVI data.

689 High Frequency Passive Microwave Radiometry over a Snow-Covered Surface in Alaska
A.B. Tait, D.K. Hall, J.L. Foster, and A.T.C. Chang

The study was to determine whether these data can be used to identify clouds, vegetation type, and snow cover.

697 A Remote Sensing Strategy for Measuring Logging Road System Length from Small-Format Aerial Photography
John P. Rowe, Timothy A. Warner, Darrell R. Dean, Jr., and Andrew F. Egan

The accuracy of the strategy is limited by the use of uncontrolled mosaics, lens distortion, tilt displacement, topographic displacement, and scale variation.

705 Evaluation of Geostatistical Measures of Radiometric Spatial Variability for Lithologic Discrimination in Landsat TM Images
Francisco Abarca-Hernández and Mario Chica-Olmo

The use of Landsat TM radiometric data together with measures of spatial variability (MSV) improves the overall accuracy of the lithologic discrimination.

713 A Method for the Automated Production of Digital Terrain Models Using a Combination of Feature Points, Grid Points, and Filling Back Points
Jung-Sheng Hsia and Ian Newton

Tests of the method, employing software designed to run on a PC platform, have given encouraging results.

Announcements
664 Resource ‘99—Update
669 Call for Papers: African Applications
678 Call for Papers: The Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH) Commission on Cartography Technical Meeting
703 Photogrammetric Society Membership Form
704 Pecora 14/Land Satellite Information III
720 GIS Books from ASPRS

Columns & Updates
643 Headquarters News -- Hepner Elected Vice President; ASPRS Fellows Named; Mikhail Selected Honorary Member
653 Industry News
657 Grids & Datums -- Morocco
659 Remote Sensing

Departments
661 Who’s Who in ASPRS
662 Sustaining Members
665 New Members
666 Index to Advertisers
670 Instructions to Authors
696 Forthcoming Articles
721 Calendar
722 Classifieds
725 Bookstore
729 Professional Directory
733 Membership Application

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