State-of-the-art Trends in Mapping – Past, Present and Future

The photogrammetry has used the general development of the technique for its own purpose. It started with the analogue, continued with the analytical and reached now the digital methods. Digital systems do now allow a high degree of automation. With the digital possibilities in imaging and processing together with automation, we are not far away from on-line generation of ortho images. The integration with Geo Information Systems (GIS) leads now to an integrated information system – we do have a transition of mapping to Geoinformatics. The automatic feature extraction is under research and development; the first steps are not far away from operational use. Parallel to the development of the data acquisition, the imaging technique has been changed. The film cameras have reached the end of the development with optimal optics, the introduction of image motion compensation and the use of gyro stabilized platforms. Now we are at the beginning of the change to digital imaging with the new cameras DMC and ADS40. Parallel to this we do have with the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) new possibilities of mapping independent upon weather conditions. The direct determination of DEM’s with laser scanning, named also LIDAR, and Interferometric SAR (IfSAR) has opened a new field like also the satellite imaging. With the very high-resolution satellite systems we are now in a competition to aerial photogrammetry.