Aerotriangulation
Kucera has full in-house capability to perform aerotriangulation for final georeferencing of photogrammetric aerial imagery in either conventional "fully analytical" or more recently introduced "softcopy" fashion. Kucera has been performing conventional fully analytical aerotriangulation in-house for over 25 years and softcopy aerotriangulation in-house since the mid-90s.
For the analytical aerotriangulation process, currently calibrated Kern and Wild/Leica precision pugging instruments with 60-micron diamond tip drills are used to physically mark, or "pug" the positions of triangulation points on the aerial film directly, or more commonly, on dimensionally stable film diapositive reproductions of the aerial images.
The softcopy aerotriangulation process is performed on the digital representation of the aerial imagery as opposed to the physical image media. In the softcopy process, Inpho Systems MATCH AT softcopy aerotriangulation stations use digital image processing/correlation technology to automatically join digital image stereopairs and select distinct triangulation pass points, with ground control point locations being automatically driven to and manually measured.
The softcopy process is typically favored for its rapid processing speed and high pass point redundancy/accuracy on larger projects having correlation-suitable terrain texture. Where terrain texture is less suitable for image correlation, such as significant expanses of open water or forestland, the analytical process with manual pass point selection may be superior.