Kucera has been one of the country’s largest producers of orthophotography since the mid-1980s. Kucera currently produces tens of thousands of digital orthophotos annually in color or in black and white at scales and pixel resolutions ranging from 1″=10′/0.1′ pixel to 1″=1000′/4′ pixel.
Kucera’s digital orthophoto production is a multi-stage process involving image rectification and initial quality control review, automated processing of the rectified imagery, and final manual quality control review and edit.
Image rectification is performed on Inpho OrthoMaster and Z/I OrthoPro dedicated digital orthophoto production stations. The digital aerial imagery is pixel-rectified in a batch process to the DEM/DTM point grid using a high-grade radiometric interpolation, with resampling to the target pixel resolution performed with a bicubic or bilinear resampling algorithm.
After rectification, the imagery is tone balanced and processed into the final seamless image tiles using Inpho OrthoVista, an advanced orthophoto image processing technology that performs optimized image tone adjustment, resampling, and tile formation in a batch mode. Blocks of rectified images are processed to a seamless overall image representation, from which coordinate-defined tiles and/or resampled imagery is copied/extracted and output in the appropriate format.
The aerial imagery is rectified to both the ground surface DEM/DTM and breakline data representing the bridge deck to generate an accurate image representation. “Lean” effects of more significant vertical features are minimized by using increased image overlap in the aerial photo acquisition and selecting/constructing optimal image views. Kucera’s Inpho OrthoMaster software also has automated routines for the generation of “true” orthophotography with complete lean elimination across the imagery.
