Use in Remote 
s, 5. Workshop 
y. 95-103. 
ite signal in the 
  
Hans Peter Röser 
  
NEW POTENTIAL AND APPLICATIONS OF ADS 
Hans P. Roeser', Andreas Eckardt^, Maria von Schoenermark®, Rainer Sandau®, Peter Fricker” 
‘DLR Institute of Sensor Technology and Planetary Exploration, Rutherfordstr. 2, D-12489 Berlin 
Germany 
9 
"LH Systems GmbH, Heinrich-Wild-Strasse, CH-9435 Heerbrugg, Switzerland 
KEYWORDS: digital camera, digital photogrammetry, multispectral imagery, airborne remote sensing 
ABSTRACT 
Joint development work by DLR and LH Systems has produced a new camera concept called Airborne Digital Sensor 
(ADS) which is using forward-, nadir- and backward-looking linear arrays on the focal plane. The camera system 
provides panchromatic and stereo information using three CCD lines and up to five more lines for multispectral imagery 
including two NIR channels. Each CCD array for panchromatic measurements has 24000 elements, resulting in a field 
of view of 64 degrees (across track FOV) by using a focal length of 62.5 mm. The sensitivity covers a dynamic range of 
12 bit with a recording interval time of 1.2 ms per line. The performance of the camera allows a 3-dimensional and 
multispectral image with a ground sample distance of 25 cm for an area of 300 square miles within a flight time shorter 
than one hour. 
1 INTRODUCTION 
Increasing world-wide industrialization and population growth make remote sensing very important for investigating 
and monitoring the ecological system of the Earth. Today almost every country makes use of airborne and satellite 
remote sensing products for mapping earth resources and land use/land cover and for monitoring such changing 
phenomena as cultivation, forestry, spring growth and meteorological and hydrological events. We are rapidly moving 
into an era where remote sensing, combined with geographic information systems technologies and applications- 
oriented modeling, will produce information about current and future resource potentials. Besides scientific interest 
their use by government agencies, private companies and individuals is virtually routine. Figure 1 shows a summary of 
nine important remote sensing areas of application as a function of their needs for spatial and spectral resolution, and 
Figure 2 illustrates spatial resolutions and revisit times for eight different remote sensing tasks. The very large variation 
in spatial, spectral and temporal characteristics of objects we wish to measure and record is mostly covered by 
spaceborne and airborne measurements which are complementary. The preference for airborne observations is when it 
comes to regional, high spatial resolution (10 cm to a few meters), the necessity of measuring daily or even more 
frequently, and regions with regular cloud coverage. 
  
International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXIII, Part Bl. Amsterdam 2000. 251