Arpenteur 3.0: Recent Developments in Web Based Photogrammetry

Experiences and recent developments of a WEB application dedicated to digital photogrammetry are presented. The aim of the ARPENTEUR project (as Architectural PhotogrammEtry Network Tool for EdUcation and Research) is to propose a photogrammetric concept and software embedded in Web technology and Java programming language. Photogrammetry and 3D modeling tools are available on the Internet with a simple browser (http://www.arpenteur.net). Four years ago the first prototype of ARPENTEUR was based on the Java Development Kit (J.D.K. 1.1) at the time only available for some browsers. Nowadays, we are working with the J.D.K. 1.4 plug-in enriched by Java Advancing Imaging (J.A.I. 1.1) library. The local computer simply requires the installation of these plug-ins. Different photogrammetry projects have been presented since the Amsterdam ISPRS congress in 2000: stone by stone photogrammetric survey using architectural knowledge, I-MAGE process (Image processing and Measure Assisted by Geometrical primitive), 3D plotting and orthoimage generation, underwater photogrammetry and web integrated documentation system. Photogrammetric solutions are available for the orientation of any kind of digital images (with fiducial marks, réseau, or non metric ones). Orientation results can also be imported from the PhotoModeler package in order to focus on the modeling modules available in ARPENTEUR without having to measure again the orientation points. In the version 3.0 of ARPENTEUR, XML “documents” as data and result files are built. XML is a markup language for documents containing structured information. XML technologies strongly separate presentation and content, and thus are an ideal means to present, understand, manipulate and transfer data between different applications. We propose to discuss in the paper about photogrammetry and XML language, with a proposal of “model definition” as a first step towards a specification for structured documents in photogrammetry and their use on the web.