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INNOVATION IN FLIGHT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS USING REAL-TIME TOPOLOGICAL GIS ANALYSIS 
David Hine 1 , Gerhard Kemper 2 , Frantsek Pivnicka 3 , Li Hongbo 4 
1: David Hine, Land and water Management, Mission Beach / Australia 
2: Office for Geotechnics, Geoinformatics and Service, Speyer / Germany 
3: TopoL Software Ltd. Prague / CZ 
4: Big Map Ltd, Beijing / China 
WgS CPS WG 4/3 C Automated Geo-Spatial Data Acquisition and Mapping 
KEY WORDS: Photogrammetry, Technology, Navigation, Platforms, Aerial, GPS/INS, Instruments, Software, Experiment, 
ABSTRACT: 
Digital data has replaced most paper maps for managers, aided by the increasing ease of transformation from raster to vector, and the 
capture of data in digital format natively. Some data will remain in raster format where it is intrinsically continuous, primarily 
remotely sensed data from satellite and aerial platforms. GIS has matured into a powerful tool for the storage, analysis and display of 
data from disparate sources. It is the central tool in our daily spatial data management. 
There are about ten FMS (Flight Management Systems) in the marketplace, but only a few of them are GIS-based. In our paper, we 
highlight the benefits of GIS based workflows in the planning and execution of data capture, and a widening range of other, related, 
aerial tasks. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Geographic information systems and the concomitant digital 
data have, over the past two decades, enabled the simplification 
of existing tasks, and the delivery of other innovative tasks. 
There exists a real need to have a GIS based application for 
aeronautics and avionic, mostly for planning and managing 
aerial photographs and also for scanning operations. GIS 
enables access to a range of tools that can be used for the 
planning and the navigation and project management parts of 
the process. Given the importance of interoperability, GIS 
enables data to be Easily imported or exported to other systems 
and data-exchange can be done to and from very different 
platforms. Such a solution is embedded into the geo-data-world 
and not a single solution or line of products. As most of the 
existing applications are made to integrate into complete 
solutions within one brand, the flexibility of the applications is 
small. They are limited in the range of sensors to which they 
will connect and also in the data-exchange formats that are part 
of the product. 
Existing technologies seldom allow the operator to monitor the 
done work in real time. Rapid updating of sensor data and the 
use of software applications designed for cockpit environment 
enables higher efficiency and greater control over the results. 
The newly developed system aims to helps companies and pilots 
to do effective campaigns in aerial photography or scanning 
(e.g. laser scanning/LiDAR). The system is based on software 
and hardware components including GPS, INS, cockpit-PC, 
GIS-application and real-time navigation with control- 
functions. A stabilized mount can be used to reduce rotation of 
camera axes. Through routines within GIS packages or in 
standalone applications, there are many options for the 
transformation of data between formats and between datums. 
Since turn of this century, desktop computing power has been 
sufficient to deal with large amounts of data. The first 
achievement was to bring together the disparate paper based 
maps into one system; to display them as layers required the 
development of systems to transform the map coordinates into 
one projection. It has become possible to reproject layers with 
different projections into one consistent projection and to do so 
on the fly. In addition to the continuous gradient of raster data 
was added topology enabling analysis of adjacency and 
connectedness etc. 
2. BASIC GIS FEATURES 
GIS is a tool widely used for mapping, planning, navigation and 
data-analysis. While some GIS software was initially developed 
as either raster or vector based, hybrid systems that use raster 
and vector data have become the standard. Displaying of raster- 
data e.g. orthophotos, satellite data and scanned maps, is 
common for most of them. Some however offer additional 
capabilities as transformation, mosaicing or raster analysis. All 
GIS use vector data with attached database. Vector-data are 
hierarchical and in some systems also topological. Dealing with 
different vector formats either by Open GIS rules or via import 
or export-filters is standard nowadays. Reading of the wide 
range of raster formats is also well developed.. Modem GI- 
Systems are used for mapping in combination with GPS live 
time as navigation solution. This feature was used for 
AeroTopoL FMS that is based on TopoL GIS. It is particularly 
important where the three dimensional component of the feature 
is important. For example, purely raster based GIS applications 
cannot retain their position when a vehicle passes through a 
place where roads are in layers one above the other. Similarly, 
elevation of the terrain is important in photogrammetry. 
AeroTopoL has all features that TopoL GIS, the base on which 
it was built, has. Basic functions are classical vector and raster- 
operations and database management. Besides various filters for 
the import or export of vector data, digitizing and editing of 
blocks or shapefiles can be done within TopoL and software 
derived from it. Various formats of georeferenced rasters can be 
loaded and displayed in the map-window, including geotiff, 
.ecw and jpeg 2000. Depending on the version, there are also