Performance of Medium Format Digital Aerial Sensor Systems

Dealing with digital airborne photogrammetric data acquisition today’s main focus is quite often exclusively laid on the large format digital sensor systems like ADS40 (Leica Geosystems), DMC (ZI-Imaging) and UltracamD (Vexcel Austria) which are already used in practice now. Their advantages are well known, nonetheless, for smaller area projects the use of such large format systems might be ineffective. Hence, there still is a need for smaller cameras which can be used in a more flexible and cost effective way. This application is addressed within the paper, where the main focus is on the medium format sector, utilizing digital matrix arrays about 15 Megapixel. After some first remarks on classification of digital matrix cameras the requirements for usage of non-dedicated sensors in airborne photogrammetric environments are recalled. The second part of the paper concentrates on the demonstration of the potential of two exemplarily chosen medium format cameras, namely the DSS sensor system from Applanix/Emerge, the dIGIcam-K14 sensor system from IGI and the Kodak DCS Pro 14n. The DSS is based on a classical analogue medium format housing which is supplemented with a digital CCD camera back, whereas the last two are using a standard small format camera housing with CMOS matrix array. The performance of such systems is proven from the results of airborne tests.