An integrated approach for orthoimage production

Orthoimage and orthomosaic production has traditionally been a sequential process with many steps. With digital photogrammetry a part of the steps have been automated, but still the process requires a lot of operator effort. Now that digital cameras are entering the market and the number of images to be processed is increasing there is a clear need to automate the whole workflow as much as possible. One possibility is to use an integrated approach for orthomosaic production. The integrated approach described in this paper is merging all the steps from tie point measurement to orthomosaic creation into one highly automated step. The method is based on global matching / object reconstruction and is now in the process of beeing implemented into a parallel processing software called Complete OBject Reconstruction Application – COBRA. In this paper some early sample results of COBRA applied on forest and built-up areas are shown and discussed. These are two difficult areas for all automatic image matching and image mosaicking methods.