PREFACE
Since the first Mobile Mapping Symposium held in Columbus, Ohio in 1995, there
have been numerous papers on this exciting topic published in journals and
conference proceedings. The emerging technology of mobile mapping and its
enormous potential have attracted a great deal of attention in academic and industrial
communities. We observed that a few new systems have been developed every year
and thousands of miles of roads have been surveyed by the mobile mapping systems.
This workshop should serve as a forum for researchers, developers and users of
mobile mapping systems to summarize the achievements, find out the current
problems, and map out the future development.
The papers collected in this proceedings demonstrate that building a mobile mapping
system by integrating off-the-shelf hardware and software components requires
significant courage, investment, and efforts, but has been endeavors of many
universities and companies on almost all continents in recent years. Land-based
systems have demonstrated the power promised at the early time of the development,
for example in road and railway survey, utility survey and others. The takeover of the
part of such traditional markets is believed to be only a start. Meanwhile, the very
same concept has been transferred to airborne and satellite-borne platforms where
positional and orientational sensors are integrated with imaging sensors to approach
real-time mapping that is not restricted to where only land vehicles can reach. The
“dream” is to achieve the same level of ground position accuracy as traditional aerial
triangulation. Of course, an integration of the sensor-based orientation data with aerial
triangulation would provide much better results. We trust that with the rapid
development in mobile mapping, automatic triangulation, and automatic
feature/image matching, a real-time system will be a reality in the near future.
A question we may want to ask ourselves is “have the current mobile mapping
systems reached full potential?” The answer is a definite NO. We still see that mobile
mapping takes only a small percentage of overall surveying market where it ought to
do better a job. Four aspects need our attentions: a) prices of mobile mapping systems
are high, partly contributed by high cost components such as INS and very large CCD
chips; b) better tools for efficient or automatic extraction of useful information from
massive mobile data are need; c) accuracy should be increased for applications where
higher accuracy is desirable; and d) efforts should be made to make the spatial data
community more aware of the existence and potential of the technology.
Finally, we would like to thank AIT, NRCT, ISPRS, IAG and FIG for sponsoring the
workshop. We appreciate the hard work by staff and members of program committee
and organizing committee, as well as chairpersons of the working groups involved.
Ron Li, Ohio State University
Shunji Murai, Asian Institute of Technology
