The UltraCam-project created a novel Large Format Digital Aerial Camera. It was inspired by the ISPRS Congress 2000 in Amsterdam.

UltraCam Eagle, the ultra large format digital aerial frame camera is the latest product out of a family of innovative mapping cameras by Microsoft/Vexcel. The sensor was introduced in 2011 and was well accepted by the community. The ultra large frame format of 20010 pixels cross track and 13080 pixels along the flight line offers a high productivity in the air. The sensor head consists of new CCD sensor arrays, new optical lens systems and new electronic components. In this contribution we present the camera design, technical parameters and the result from different flight missions.

ABSTRACT:In the last years, Microsoft has driven innovation in the aerial photogrammetry community. Besides the market leading camera technology, UltraMap has grown to an outstanding photogrammetric workflow system which enables users to effectively work with large digital aerial image blocks in a highly automated way. Best example is the project-based color balancing approach which automatically balances images to a homogeneous block. UltraMap V3 continues innovation, and offers a revolution in terms of ortho processing. A fully automated dense matching module strives for high precision digital surface models (DSMs) which are calculated either on CPUs or on GPUs using a distributed processing framework. By applying constrained filtering algorithms, a digital terrain model can be derived which in turn can be used for fully automated traditional ortho texturing. By having the knowledge about the underlying geometry, seamlines can be generated automatically by applying cost functions in order to minimize visual disturbing artifacts. By exploiting the generated DSM information, a DSMOrtho is created using the balanced input images. Again, seamlines are detected automatically resulting in an automatically balanced ortho mosaic. Interactive block-based radiometric adjustments lead to a high quality ortho product based on UltraCam imagery. UltraMap v3 is the first fully integrated and interactive solution for supporting UltraCam images at best in order to deliver DSM and ortho imagery.