QUALITY ASPECTS OF AERIAL DIGITAL ORTHOPHOTOS, THE PRODUCERS POINT OF VIEW

Abstract. The paper gives an overview on the problems occurring during commercial digital orthophoto (DOP) production. There is a wide variety in requirements on orthophotos. It is no problem to produce good orthophotos in small areas, whereas production of good and homogeneous orthophotos in large areas remains a challenge. Therefore, we discuss large area orthophotos based on regular areal flight with regular flight parameters and nadir images, not on large numbers of images creating orthophotos based on various oblique images.

The focus of the paper is to optimize the process of line production of orthophotos to achieve the best results under minimum usage of resources. Beside improvements in commercial software, the improvement in process design can help to achieve this objectives. It is necessary the attach importance to the different quality aspects to invest the limited resources at the most profitable process step.

The requirements on orthophotos can be grouped into three categories: geometric, radiometric and aesthetic requirements. The main intention is to generate correct and well interpretable orthoimages, putting attention to geometry and radiometry. Many requirements cause enormous expenditures in flight time, number of images and amount of interactive editing work.

Among the geometric aspects, the accuracy is the prominent factor. The geometric quality of the underlying digital terrain model (DTM) is of outstanding importance. Depending on the used focal length during acquisition and overlap, geometric errors in the DTM are directly represented in the orthophoto. Particularly at manmade surface break lines, even horizontal DTM errors occur striking in the orthophotos.

A special consideration is to put on objects outside the DTM surface. While buildings may be represented in a good manner in a digital surface models (DSM) to generate so called “true orthophotos”, there is no way to represent vegetation, cables, poles etc. in an appropriate manner in any DSM.

Seam lines have to disappear in the mosaics. There should be no indication for the detection of the used seam lines nether in geometric nor in radiometric edges.

The radiometric aspect include a good distribution of the color values in the histogram, good contrasts should become quantified. It is impossible to measure the aesthetic quality, but is has to be homogeneous over the whole project area without eye-catching artefacts.

In the conclusion, we want to give to the producers of orthophotos and their clients a list of criteria and quality figures to be agreed on before the production starts to avoid later discussions.