November 8

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Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week, I feature a guest article on the 13th Intergeo conference by Tom Gibson, the editor of GIS Monitor's sister publication, Professional Surveyor Magazine and I profile 3Di West, a photogrammetry company. Plus, 20 press releases.

— Matteo Luccio

Report on the 13th Intergeo Conference

The 13th Intergeo conference and trade fair for geodesy, geoinformation and land management took place in Leipzig, Germany, September 25 to 27. Tom Gibson, editor of Professional Surveyor Magazine, attended the conference and wrote this report.

As I awoke each morning in my room at the Marriott hotel in Leipzig, I peered at an office building across the narrow street. Occasional rooms were lit with people working in them and I wondered what they were doing. Then I noticed a sign on the roof that said "Leipziger Freiheit." I wondered for days what this company was before I learned that Leipziger Freiheit isn't actually a company but means "Leipzig Liberty." These two little words go a long way in explaining the character and status of Leipzig and why we are here.

This year, the 13th Intergeo took place in Leipzig, Germany in September with the theme "Knowledge and Action for Planet Earth." This ranks as the world's largest congress and trade fair for geodesy, geoinformation, and land management.

A bustling, vibrant city of 500,000 located in the state of Saxony, Leipzig blends the old with the new. Old-style European buildings exist side-by-side with gleaming new highbrow shops. Narrow streets filled with vendors fill the inner city, while modern suburban thoroughfares further out see heavy traffic from cars, trams, and bicycles. It becomes obvious that the city has embraced free market reforms to become one of the fastest-growing economic regions in Europe.

But while the flavor appears modern, the reasons for it go back many centuries. In the 7-9th centuries, the Sorbs, a group of Slavic settlers who venerated the lime tree, founded Lipzk, meaning "place of limes." In 1165, Leipzig was granted municipal status and market privileges, ushering in the era of large fairs. By the mid-16th century, Leipzig had developed into a prosperous city — many Renaissance buildings from then remain today.

Leipzig became known as "Hero City" in 1989 after 70,000 people demonstrated peacefully for freedom of speech and association in East Germany and the right to travel freely. These mass demonstrations against the East German communist regime eventually led to its fall.

Over past centuries, Leipzig became known as a center of trade fairs with its Leipzig Fair, as a complex of fair buildings has existed since around 1165. This, combined with the rise of democracy, set the stage for what would make Leipzig an ideal venue for Intergeo. Today, the city boasts the new Leipzig Fair Exhibition Centre, which opened 11 years ago. This sprawling concrete complex that hosted the conference sports a shiny steel and glass facade.

From All Over the World

An estimated 17,000 visitors from 50 countries came to the trade show, and an additional 2,000 attended the congress. The German Society for Geodesy, Geoinformation, and Land Management (DVW) and the German Society for Cartography (DGfK) jointly organized Intergeo this year. As part of this joint effort, they integrated the 55th DGfK German Cartographers' Day into the event.

For the opening ceremonies, dignitaries welcomed us with addresses, and plenary sessions followed. Professor Omar Akbar, director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and a specialist in urban development spoke on "The Values of the European city in the context of globalization." Gerold Werner, ministerialrat of Saxony, presented the "Saxony GDI (geodata infrastructure) Initiative" and explained the state's "Strategy for providing basic geodata." (I'd tell you what they said, but they spoke in German.)

The congress part of the conference featured about 100 technical sessions, but they were attended by few people compared to the masses streaming through the trade show. Five series of lectures ran in parallel with two DVW Forums covering the traditional core topics of geodesy, geoinformation, and land management and the DGfK Forum on current developments in cartography. Most sessions were in German.

In one of the few technical sessions in English, "Advanced Use of Oblique and Nadir Pictures for Photogrammetry," a representative from COWI, a company from Denmark, explained the benefits of oblique aerial photos. More objects are visible, and you can get higher resolution. They use GPS in conjunction with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) as they fly to maintain georeferencing, and they also use a digital elevation model (DEM). They also use high-density Lidar scanning and are 100-percent digital.

In the "Airborne Lidar Technology for Transmission Line Management" session, Optech told how Lidar has become popular for this in the last ten years. It's not as simple as topographic mapping, but it yields much faster data collection than traditional methods, and you can get 15-centimeter accuracy. Power lines are hard to scan because they're thin (3-27 mm in diameter) and make a linear target. Temperature, pressure, and humidity affect accuracy, and wind causes problems when it blows wires around.

Companies came from 28 countries all over the world to exhibit at the trade fair, as 475 vendors displayed their wares in two massive exhibit halls. These included the usual companies; Topcon, Trimble, Leica Geosystems, Autodesk, Optech, and ESRI each had a big presence. Topcon seemed to be everywhere. Its signature laser light show went off like Old Faithful on a big screen to the sound of booming music and the pouring out of smoke.

Although any conceivable area of surveying was covered, aerial mapping, laser scanning, machine control, and GIS seemed to emerge as the most common themes. Many Chinese and Russian companies exhibited. One of the latter that made a splash was Moscow-based GEOKOSMOS, which offers laser scanning and digital imaging technology, from airborne images and data processing to the creation of 3D models and photographic maps. They showcased their products for flood protection, environmental monitoring, and motorway and railway construction.

As an added twist, Fokus Forums took place on the trade show floor, giving companies half an hour each to talk about their products and services. Blue Marble Geographics demonstrated the latest advances in coordinate conversion technology for GIS with their Geographic Calculator 7.0. In another one, Leica demonstrated its new TITAN web portal that serves as a geospatial social network and makes it easier to find, view, and retrieve information. They see it as translating the concept of Internet sharing to the geospatial world.

Time for a Little Fun

On Wednesday after the trade show ended, parties broke out, with Leica cranking up a live band and handing out free bottles of Lowenbrau beer. Not to be outdone, GEOKOSMOS also had a live band not far away, setting up a battle of the bands. People remarked how employees comprised the GEOKOSMOS band, with their CEO as the lead singer. He belted out oldy-goldy tunes like "Nights in White Satin," "Honky Tonk Woman," and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," singing in English but talking between songs in Russian.

Each day, we took the public tram back from the exhibition center to the hotel, coursing through Leipzig's suburbs and neighborhoods. While the inner city exudes charm, these areas appear more rundown, indicative of the communist era from years past. Graffiti seemed to cover parts of every building we passed.

We walked all over town, exploring Leipzig through its narrow streets and lush green parks. At the heart of the city lies its historical center encircled by a ring road and green promenade. We ventured to the Leipzig Zoo just beyond the inner city. Within easy walking distance of the city center, the Hauptbahnhof ranks as the largest train station in Europe, and its massive complex includes a huge shopping mall like you see in the United States.

Leipzig boasts a musical heritage, as it was home to several composers including Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, and Robert and Clara Schumann. You can visit Thomaskirche, the church where Bach played the organ and led the St. Thomas's Boys Choir.

Intergeo takes place in a different city in Germany every year, allowing visitors like us to explore a different part of the country. In 2008, it will run September 30 through October 2 in Bremen in northern Germany. I can't wait to explore that new city and see how Intergeo unfolds in its context.

Profile of a Photogrammetry Company

The photogrammetry industry in the United States received a big boost after World War II, when returning pilots, camera operators, and photointerpreters provided a large pool of personnel who were able to transfer their skills and experience into civilian occupations, applying aerial photography and remote sensing to a broad range of problems. In 1949 one of these veterans, H.G. Chickering, opened one of the first photogrammetric mapping companies in the Western United States in Eugene, Oregon. It is now called 3Di West and is owned by six of its current and former senior managers, who bought it in 2002 from 3Di Technologies, which was consolidating on the East Coast. In the intervening five years, 3Di West has doubled its staff, now numbering 26, opened a new office in Boise, Idaho, and more than tripled its revenues, with projects throughout the country. In addition to its photogrammetry, orthophotography, and mapping departments, the company two years ago launched a new GIS department, which provides both complete GIS products as well as consulting services.

This week, I visited the company and interviewed its president, Bret Hazell, as well as the managers in charge of photogrammetry, orthophotos, GIS, and project delivery. Following is my interview with Hazell; in next week's issue I will report on my other conversations.

1. What accounts for most of your company's growth?

   I think that we've managed to market ourselves in a niche. Many photogrammetry companies have either become very large or very small — not many of them are comfortable in the middle. We've kept ourselves from getting too big by using teammates to take the overflow work. We do most of our work in-house, but we have several ex-employees who work out of their homes and we use them as needed. Our wide variety of clients and the fact that we are doing work all over the United States have helped us. We do work for four different state departments of transportation, military federal work, and a lot of work for states, cities, and counties.

2. How would you define your niche?

   We focus on high accuracy work — a lot of engineer-grade 20-, 50-, 100-scale mapping and feature data collection. We do a lot of work for the Air Force, the Navy, and the Corps of Engineers—though no classified work.

3. With whom do you contract for the flights?

   Wherever the job is, we hire a local firm to acquire imagery—whether with a film-based camera or a digital camera—using our flight plans. We are constantly flying new jobs. We have many different vendors spread throughout the United States to help us out. We also need to put surveyors on the ground in most of our locations—for ground-truthing and control. We have an in-house surveyor, but probably 75 percent of our jobs are controlled by an outside surveyor. To put down the targets and that sort of thing, we hire a local person that is qualified or others with whom we have established relationships. We also fly quite a few LiDAR data collection jobs.

4. Do you give the flight companies digital files with the flight paths for them to upload to the GPS receivers in their aircraft?

   Yes, it is a set of files that tell them where the flight line and its alignment are and where the exposure stations are along that flight line. There still is skill involved in maintaining their flight lines and exposure stations. We are really giving them reference points. The exposure stations are a series of waypoints along a line. When they hit the waypoint, usually the camera triggers automatically. Because we work with so much stereo photography, everything we take is overlapping about 60 percent stereo. Some of the film and digital jobs go to 80 percent if we want to have a little bit more endlap. It increases the quality of the orthophoto and makes everything stand up a little straighter.

5. At what frequency do you take the pictures?

   It depends on the altitude and the photo scale. Most of the time, we select an overlap that results in a 60 percent image-to-image overlap.

6. What are the various phases of your in-house workflow?

   Once we get the imagery in-house, normally it goes first to our 15 photogrammetrists, who work in stereo environments, in shifts, on ten soft-copy work stations—that's quite a few compared to many of our competitors. They extract the information off the film—whether it is a terrain model or feature data—obtaining that information from the imagery and the controls. Those things are set up inside the system and the operators are manually collecting most of that information, interpreting and collecting points that define features and break lines. You can do some automated collection, but most of the accuracy in the type of work that we do is done in a manual mode.

7. Do you use automated feature extraction at all?

   We use it some, for orthophoto jobs, when we just need a surface, but it is not accurate or consistent enough to be used for many of the engineering-grade jobs that we do.

8. Where does the data go from there?

   Once the data is collected, it goes to several different places. One of them is the orthophoto department, which uses the terrain model that is collected in photogrammetry and the imagery that has also already been provided from the flight, to create orthophotos—corrected images that are to scale and that meet certain accuracy specifications. In most cases, we are also going after a certain resolution. Data sets will also go to the editing department, where editing will generate final contours. They'll clean up the maps into more finished products that are delivered in AutoCAD or in ArcGIS. There you have contours with text that has been inserted, line work that has been connected and cleaned, and sometimes actual tiles, or sheets. Photogrammetrists collect information in areas called stereo-models. The stereo-models go to editing and are connected all up into bigger maps. Then, often, if a GIS deliverable is required, the edited stereo-models will go to the GIS department. They make sure that there is good topology or proper relationships between features, that polygons are closed, that line work is clean, that connectivity is accurate, and that everything is in a form that clients are actually going to use in their GIS.

9. What else does your GIS group do?

   It has two parts: one is providing datasets that we produce, the other is developing Web applications and things like. They get their ArcGIS or AutoCAD map data, hop onto the Web, make sure that our clients can use that internally within their city intranet or through the Internet and get the data out to the public. So we also do GIS applications, as opposed to just delivering GIS datasets.

10. Do you also compile GIS data from other sources?

    Yes, we can utilize sources that we don't produce ourselves. We take those pieces, add them to the overall database of information, deliver them to our clients, and teach them how to utilize them. We get those datasets through many Internet sites. Clients also often give us datasets to insert into their finished products—such as boundary information, ownership, that type of thing.

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