Flying the New Large Format Digital Aerial Camera UltraCam-D

The race to replace the aerial film camera started in July 2000 with the product announcements of the ADS-40 by LH- Systems (now Leica Geosystems) and of the DMC by Z/I Imaging. Recently, the UltraCam-D was introduced. This is a 90 Mpixel large format aerial camera by Vexcel Imaging to add an innovative offering with a focus on a on-on-one replacement of aerial film cameras. This is achieved by the continued use of an unchanged work flow, very much as if the digital image had not been obtained from a digital camera but by scanning a film image, yet with dramatic economic advantages as well as with the added benefit of a smooth all-digital operation. While this "unchanged workflow" is an initial value of the new system, it nonetheless offers numerous opportunities for improving the current state-of-affairs of photogrammetry, as much so that one could speak about a "paradigm shift". The most important opportunity is the ability to dramatically increase the forward overlaps in photogrammetric surveys without any added cost, and producing a much higher level of automation in photogrammetric data analysis. Photogrammetric software will have to be adjusted to go from current stereo, thus "2-ray photogrammetry" towards multi-eye, thus " multi-ray" solutions.