Megapixels, Millimetres and Microsieverts: Packaging Digital Photogrammetry for Emerging Industrial Markets

Abstract

As the performance of megapixel digital imaging systems continues to improve, the rapid growth of high-end consumer markets drives prices ever lower. When such cameras are married with emerging, desktop "photogrammetric" software packages, the close range photogrammetric community is faced with many new challenges and opportunities. The dramatic changes in the technological arena are matched by a rapidly changing business environment in which concepts such as "Partnering" and "Supply chain management" have become key themes. As organizations of all sizes seek to thrive within this new business landscape, there appears to be a willingness to think more flexibly about the client-supplier relationship and the sharing of risks and rewards. This, in turn, has encouraged the development of highly customized measurement solutions across a wide range of market sectors. In each of these solutions the emphasis is not on a generic photogrammetric product, but on a highly tailored system tightly coupled to existing workflows, and focused on the specific needs of the client. Such systems pose particular challenges to their designers, since they are frequently operated by users with relatively little photogrammetric background and yet must always meet the challenging requirement of producing an output which is "fit for purpose". Thus this paper hopes to show how novel megapixel imaging systems can be configured to deliver flexible measurement systems capable of millimetric level accuracy within the challenging engineering environments typical of the nuclear and process industries (hence the microsievert component of the title).