Rapid Mapping of the 3d Urban Environment

The United Kingdom Armed Forces face an increasing requirement to accurately and rapidly map the 3D urban environment in order to support a wide range of activities including active engagement of forces, counter terrorism and peace keeping measures. The challenges faced by the UK Forces have resulted in a diverse range of mapping requirements that may overlap or differ significantly. This in turn has generated a wide customer base. The initial requirement of this study was therefore to capture this complex and fragmented situation, to define the needs and information requirements of urban data users and to bring together the relevant active work programmes to meet these needs. A plethora of photogrammetric and remote sensing software tools are available to generate, render and analyse 3D urban models. Thus a second requirement was to perform a review of applicable software tools, identifying their suitability for application to defence tasks. The final aim was to assess the current capability within the UK user community to generate 3D urban datasets, determining the tools used and whether there are any obvious gaps in capability that can be quickly and easily filled. This study gives an overview of the current activities addressing urban mapping, as well as exploring the sources of urban mapping information. This examination of existing capability, available solutions and future UK military requirements will help to shape future developments within this field by advising UK procurement and research programmes for future years.