1201 
SEAMLESS MAPPING SYSTEM FOR HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGERY 
Haibin Ai a b *, Jianqing Zhang 3 , Yansong Duan b 
‘‘School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, 430074 Wuhan, Hubei, China 
b Supresoft Incorporation, 430079 Wuhan, Hubei, China - 
ahb32@163.com 
Commission WgS-PS, Working Group IV/9 
KEY WORDS: Digital Photogrammetry, High Resolution Image, Distributed Computing, Topographic Mapping, Interoperability, 
Mapping System 
ABSTRACT: 
Digital Photogrammetry is the quality leap in the means, ability, efficiency and agility of spatial information acquirement. Digital 
Photogrammetric Workstation (DPW) is the mainstream product of Digital Photogrammetry System. Nowadays DPW plays 
important roles in acquiring spatial data. With the emergence of high resolution sensor, such as 1KONOS, QuickBird, SPOT5 and 
ADS40, the traditional DPW doesn’t adapt current situation. Innovative digital photogrammetry system should be developed to meet 
the network turn and industrialize production nowadays. At present, cartographic map collection is completed by means of manual 
measurement or human-computer interactive half-automatic abstract. Manual measurement covers approximate 80 percents of the 
cartographic map collection procedure. To efficiently mapping from high resolution images, a seamless mapping system based on 
network is proposed. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Digital photogrammetry automatically obtains objects’ 3D 
coordinates by identifying the correspondences from two or 
more digitized images or digital images. Comparing to Analogy 
Photogrammetry and Analytical Photogrammetry, Digital 
Photogrammetry is the quality leap in the means, ability, 
efficiency and agility of spatial information acquirement. 
Digital Photogrammetric Workstation (DPW) is the mainstream 
product of Digital Photogrammetry System. Nowadays DPW 
plays important roles in acquiring spatial data. 
Cartographic Map, Digital Terrain Model (DTM) and Digital 
Orthorectification Map (DOM) are important digital data 
sources for Spatial Information Systems. DOM is automatically 
produced from Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and original 
images by sensor’s geometrical model. With the advance of 
automatic image matching technique, DTM is also 
automatically obtained from stereo image pairs. At present it is 
not impossible that cartographic map is automatically collected 
from images despite the advance of object abstract technique. 
Cartographic map collection is completed by means of manual 
measurement or human-computer interactive half-automatic 
abstract. Manual measurement covers approximate 80 percents 
of the cartographic map collection procedure, so it is difficult to 
improve efficiency of the mapping. 
With the inventing of modem satellite and airborne high 
resolution sensors such as IKONOS, QuickBird, SPOT5 and 
ADS40, high resolution images are larger than aerial images 
and provide a challenge for algorithmic redesign, and this opens 
up the possibility of reconsidering and improving many 
photogrammetric processing components. In recent years, 
considerable research efforts have been devoted to the efficient 
utilization of these images. Research has covered, for example, 
sensor modeling and image orientation, automatic digital terrain 
model (DTM) and digital surface model (DSM) generation and 
feature extraction [Li Zhang and Armin Gruen, 2006] . 
Many photogrammetric processing approaches and workflows 
have been proposed to resolve the challenges brought forward 
by high resolution sensors’ images. Among these approaches 
and strategies distributed and parallel processing is a very 
important one. And a few distributed and parallel processing 
photogrammetric systems are nowadays commercially available 
in the market. For example, PixelFactory' developed by 
Infoterra-Global company of France and PixelPipe 1 innovated 
by Intergraph company of USA are outstanding distributed and 
parallel processing systems. These innovated systems are 
applied to practical photogrammetric produce and improve 
produce efficiency of high resolution images. These systems 
emphasize the automatic processing for high resolution images 
such as DTM/DSM generation and orthorectification. 
Unfortunately, there are no corresponding packages to collect 
cartographic map from stereo pairs in these systems. 
Cartographic map is a very important photogrammetric product. 
Unreservedly speaking, these systems are immature systems 
because of lack of cartographic map collection toolkits. 
Seamless mapping system proposed in this paper is a sub 
system of DPGrid which is a distributed and parallel 
photogrammetric processing system innovated in Wuhan 
University. As a new generation digital photogrammetry system, 
DPGrid consists of an automatic processing sub-system and a 
human-computer interactive processing sub-system. The 
objectives of automatic processing sub-system are similar to 
PixelFactory 1 and PixelPipe 1 which are used to automatic 
processing. Seamless mapping system is the human-computer 
interactive mapping system which is designed to collect 
cartographic map from stereo pairs. There are a few 
* Email: ahb32@163.com Tel: 13607138724