A New Education and Business Models Based in Low-cost Digital Photogrammetric Workstations

Digital Photogrammetry has caused a revolution in the cartographic world thanks to a simplification of the photogrammetric systems. This fact, along with the ever greater need for fast and precise cartography, has increased the number of potential digital photogrammetric users. Despite the simplification of these systems, it still important to take into account the high necessary investment of digital photogrammetric systems, particularly for sporadic users. Accordingly, it is fundamental that low-cost systems are developed which incorporate at least some of the tasks of need to initial users. These tasks could, basically, be limited to the extraction of information from images previously oriented (monoscopic and stereoscopically) and the generation of orthoimages, like such as basic documents on which to support another type of works. The STEREOVISOR system has been developed specifically with this idea in mind. STEREOVISOR is a digital photogrammetric workstation designed to provide maximum benefits for a low cost. The hardware incorporates a stereoscopic vision system by means of anaglyphs and the floating mark movement is controlled using a conventional mouse. The system incorporates several functions: a) project management; b) stereoscopic vision; c) vector information extraction, from previously oriented images as maps; d) orthoimage generation. Potential users are basically university and educational centers, governmental agencies and companies that actually are photogrammetric products customers. Such users could receive the oriented images and the program so that they can extract such information as may be of interest whenever they want. * Corresponding author.