International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B3. Istanbul 2004
replaces the traditional single-sale model of pre-paid,
contractor-to-government custom collection efforts with
multiple sale/shared geography commercial business-to-
business opportunities (Tennant et al, 2003). Experience with
Intermap’s NEXTMap Britain, NEXTMap Indonesia, as well as
other NEXTMap missions are showing that this business model
is a win-win situation for both Intermap and end users of
products.
More recently, Intermap has launched its largest ever nation-
wide mapping effort - NEXTMap USA, *the mapping event of
the decade." NEXTMap USA is a program to remap the entire
continental United States in just a few years, including the
creation of terrain elevation and imagery data accurate to 1-
meter or better covering nearly 7.9 million square kilometers of
the continental United States.
8. CONCLUSIONS AND PROSPECTS
In this article, airborne IFSAR mapping is presented to the
readers from Intermap's operational standpoint, encompassing
the technology, operating principles, mission implementation,
quality management, and business model. It can be concluded
that STAR based technology has proven to be a robust, fast,
accurate and cost-effective technology for large area 3-D
mapping.
No single mapping technology can meet all application
requirements and the paper has presented the unique advantages
and limitation of the STAR technology. Service and data
providers are taking various actions to mitigate the effects
caused by the limitations in the final product. Dependent upon
the application requirements, STAR based IFSAR mapping
products can be either complementary or competitive to
products generated using other mapping technologies. Under
the well-planned mission and well-controlled production chain,
3-D STAR products can meet pre-designed goals and are being
used efficiently for many applications. Continuously increased
application of STAR products is a testament to the success of
the technology.
Intermap is making significant contributions in transforming
science and research efforts into practical accomplishments on
its road to commercialization. At present, Intermap is
developing and refining its automated facilities to further
improve the quality and the cost-effectiveness of its products to
meet the NEXTMap mission requirements and market
challenges. An online data store — iStore — is under construction
to broaden its e-commerce capability. Efforts are being made to
extend the current infrastructure to increase throughput, on both
data acquisition and data manipulation aspects. The company
continues to enhance the quality control and assurance system
with an ever-lasting objective to bring 3-D mapping products to
the end users in a better and faster manner.
Look into future; market confidence towards this technology
and the various resulting data products is building in geospatial
community. STAR technology is becoming increasingly
important in the advancement of the overall spatial information
industry associated with mapping, GIS and remote sensing. It is
envisioned that with the continuous development of IFSAR and
supporting technologies and the increased understanding of the
application requirements, the performance of IFSAR 3-D
mapping will be further enhanced to reach a deeper and wider
application base.
9. REFERENCES
Li, X., G. Lawrence and T. Hutt, 2004. Quality control and
assurance in an IFSAR mapping environment. In: Proceedings
of the ASPRS 2004 Annual Conference, Denver, Colorado,
USA, 23-28 May.
Tennant, J. K, and T. Coyne, 1999. STAR-3i interferometric
synthetic aperture radar (INSAR): some lessons learned on the
road to commercialization. In: Proceedings of the 4th
International Airborne Remote Sensing Conference and
Exhibition/21st Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing,
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 21-24 June.
Tennant, J. K, T. Coyne and E. DeCol, 2003. STAR-3i
interferometric synthetic aperture radar (INSAR): more lessons
learned on the road to commercialization. In: Proceedings of
ASPRS/MAPPS Conference "Terrain Data: Applications and
Visulization — Making the Connection, North Charleston, South
Carolina, USA, 27-30 October.
Tighe, M. L. and A. B. Baker, 2000. Topographic line map
production using high resolution airborne interferometric SAR.
In: Proceedings of the 19th ISPRS Congress and Exhibition,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 16-22 July.
Wang, Y., B. Mercer, V. C. Tao, J. Sharma and S. Crawford,
2001. Automatic generation of bald earth digital elevation
models from digital surface models created using airborne
IFSAR. In: Proceedings of 2001 ASPRS Annual Conference, St.
Louis, Missouri, U. S. A., April 23-27, 2001.
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