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PICTRAL-ORTHO, A DIGITAL ORTHOPHOTOMAP SYSTEM 
Christian VIGNERON 
Marketing Manager for Cartography and Remote Sensing 
MATRA - Division Marketing Optique 
3, avenue du Centre - MONTIGNY 
78182 SAINT QUENTIN EN YVELINES CEDEX - FRANCE 
ABSTRACT 
The main advantage of the digital orthophoto process is the automatic 
equalization of contrasts and intensities of the different orthophotos, 
or only part of them to constitute the final orthophoto maps sheet. 
Even in black and white, the photo laboratory processing is the most 
important time consuming for such a mosaic when using conventional analog 
orthophoto map production. 
A digital orthophoto processing allows even in colour a perfect output 
quality with an important reduction of total production time and cost. 
PICTRAL ORTHO developed by the French IGN and MATRA is a stand alone 
image processing system, which allows 
- geometric rectification of pictures from conventional DIM, 
- images colour and quality enhancement, 
- histogram correction of corrected orthophotos of a map, 
- automatic setting of the most suitable mosaic boundaries, 
- automatic final map sheet data output for offset printing, 
PICTRAL ORTHO is a tool for orthophotomap at any scale from aerial photo- 
graphs as well as for satellite data rectification such as SPOT (level 3). 
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