PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
May 2018
235
Productivity
Analysis for
Medium
Format
Mapping
Cameras
Yuri Raizman
Phase One Industrial
Denmark
ntroduction
Since 2000, development and use of digital photogram-
metric cameras for aerial survey has gained significant
momentum. Many different cameras and systems de-
signed for aerial photogrammetry were developed and
presented to the market. After 15 years of intensive
development, only a few of these products are in wide
use in today’s mapping market. One of the prominent
systems being provided is the medium format frame
camera from Phase One Industrial.
With the development of CCD and CMOS technology,
medium format cameras have come a long way from
40-60 Mpix to 80-100 Mpix cameras. Additionally, high
quality metric lenses with a wide range of focal lengths
were developed and implemented. This enabled an ef-
fective utilization of medium format cameras in many
different small and medium sized urban and rural
mapping projects, corridor mapping, oblique projects,
and monitoring of areal and linear infrastructure.
This article presents recent development in the ap-
proach to flight planning and aerial survey productiv-
ity analysis, firstly presented in Raizman (2012). The
Raizman (2012) article referred only to large format
cameras, whereas this article will compare large for-
mat cameras vs. medium format cameras, which are
getting more and more popular in aerial survey. This
approach is based on some pre-defined common char-
acteristics of the required mapping products. It en-
ables an equivalent comparison between cameras with
different parameters – focal length, sensor form and
size, and pixel size. Through this article we intend to
demonstrate that for several types of urban mapping
projects, medium format cameras and large format
cameras have the same aerial survey productivity.
Image captured by Phase One iXU-RS1000,
70mm lens, Height 1,500ft, GSD 3cm.
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 84, No. 5, May 2018, pp. 235–238.
0099-1112/18/235–238
© 2018 American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.84.5.235
