The Photogrammetric Society Analogue Instrument Project: A Fifth Extract

The paper entitled The Photogrammetric Society Analogue Instrument Project was published in The Photogrammetric Record, 14(82): 565-582 and contained, as Appendix A, an extract from the Archive concerned with the history of the Zeiss Stereoplanigraph in Great Britain. A further three extracts have since been published to provide details of direct optical projection instruments used in this country and of the Vivian Thompson Stereo-plotter.
This fifth extract deals with the Wild A5 and A6 instruments. Their introduction into the United Kingdom during and just prior to the Second World War, together with their important contributions to the war effort, make interesting reading. With a grand total of just five such instruments, they were well used throughout the period of hostilities.
This extract also includes a note on the Wild A4 instrument, designed for close range photogrammetry. This was the last instrument in which Wild made use of projector lenses but it has been included at this point so that all of the Wild instruments which are listed in the Catalogue (and therefore included in the Archive) are dealt with in numerical order.     

Edgar Hynes Thompson Centenary

A significant landmark for British and international photogrammetry, as well as for this journal, occurred in January 2010 with the centenary of the birth of E. H. Thompson. Soldier and academic, polymath and wit, his scholarly contribution to our discipline has endured long after his too early death in 1976. So too have the vivid memories of those who worked with him or who were taught by him. This centenary tribute has been written by an author, E. H. Thompson's first cousin once removed, who has researched the Thompson family genealogy. The second author was a student and then an academic colleague of Thompson as well as being Assistant Editor of this journal for 11 years under Thompson's editorship.     

Edgar Hynes Thompson: aerial triangulation and ISP Commission III

This author worked with E. H. Thompson in several different contexts in the course of his military and civilian career, notably in developing Thompson's ideas about analytical aerial triangulation into a production system at the Ordnance Survey and later as a lecturer under Thompson at University College London and as Secretary of ISP Commission III when Thompson was Commission President. This essay thus stands as a separate contribution from a close colleague.     

THE USE OF POLYNOMIALS FOR ADJUSTING STRIPS TO CONTROL

The following article and correspondence have been reproduced from 'The Photogrammetric Review,' the journal of the Ordnance Survey Photogrammetric Society, by permission of the editor, as it is relevant to the paper by Professor Thompson, published in 'The Photogrammetric Record,' Vol. 1, No. 1, of March , 1953.     

THE ROLE OF THE PHOTOGRAMMETRIC SOCIETY: RESULTS OF A QUESTIONNAIRE

M embers of the Photogrammetric Society, both individual and corporate, were sent a questionnaire during December 1985. The content of the questionnaire touched upon many aspects of Society activities and it is intended that the substance of the replies should help to direct the Society in the future. An analysis of these responses was presented to the Thompson Symposium at the University of Birmingham on 19th April. 1986. It is reproduced here, together with a summary of the discussion which ensued on that occasion. Readers are encouraged to add their comments to those which follow. sending them to the Editor of The Photogrammetric Record or to the Honorary Secretary of the Photogrammetric Society.     

THE PHOTOGRAMMETRIC SOCIETY ANALOGUE INSTRUMENT PROJECT: A SECOND EXTRACT

The paper entitled The Photogrammetric Society Analogue Instrument Project was published in The Photogrammetric Record, 14(82): 565-582 (October 1993). It contained, as Appendix A, the entry from the Archive that dealt with the Zeiss Stereoplanigraph. This paper provides a second extract from the Archive concerned with the entries relating to the Barr & Stroud ZA1 plotter, the Williamson Multiplex equipment and the Thompson pinhole plotter.     

Edgar Hynes Thompson: pragmatism, ingenuity and mechanisms

In this contribution the author looks for an explanation of an uncharacteristically scathing review, by E. H. Thompson towards the end of his life, of a book, Theory of Errors and Generalized Matrix Inverses, by Arne Bjerhammar, a leading European academic.     

The Photogrammetric Society Analogue Instrument Project: a Fourth Extract

The paper entitled The Photogrammetric Society Analogue Instrument Project was published in The Photogrammetric Record, 14(82): 565-582 (October 1993) and contained, as Appendix A, an extract from the Archive concerned with the history of the Zeiss Stereoplanigraph in Great Britain. A further two extracts have since been published to provide details of direct optical projection instruments used in this country. This fourth extract now goes on to begin to provide some details of analogue plotters that employed a purely mechanical solution. The first instrument of this type to be described is the Vivian Thompson Stereo-plotter of 1907. It was in fact the very first instrument of this important category ever to be produced but unfortunately it was also the only one produced in Great Britain.     

Edgar Hynes Thompson: respect and admiration

This author, a leader of European developments in photogrammetry and especially in aerial triangulation, writes of his respect and admiration for E. H. Thompson and of their increasingly close relationship over a number of years before Thompson's early death in 1976.     

THE PHOTOGRAMMETRIC SOCIETY SYMPOSIUM, 1971

Four papers were read during the first symposium to be held by the Photogrammetric Society, at the University of Birmingham on 3rd and 4th April. Major General R. LI. Brown examined the staff structure of the organisations engaged upon the photogrammetric production of maps in the United Kingdom. Mr. J. R. Hollwey outlined the syllabus for a new Higher National Certificate in photogrammetry during a session which was devoted to education and qualifications. Subsequently, Professor A. J. van der Weele explained the evolution of the courses at ITC. By way of contrast, Professor E. H. Thompson attempted a forecast of developments in photogrammetry during the next decade. The papers succeeded in initiating prolonged discussion among the 80 members who attended.     

PRACTICAL EXPERIENCES AND PRESENT RESEARCH OBJECTS IN THE FIELD OF ANALYTICAL BLOCK TRIANGULATION WITH THE BUNDLE ADJUSTMENT METHOD IN FINLAND

The Photogrammetric Society was honoured to be addressed by the Congress Director of the International Society for Photogrammetry during March 1974. Professor Halonen's lecture covered several aspects of current photogrammetric research in Finland. The following account contains contributions by two of his colleagues, J. Hakkarainen and H. Salmenperä, on specific aspects of lens distortion and block adjustment.     

An Anniversary and a 21st Century Analogy: E. H. Thompson and the Seven-Lens Aerial Camera

E. H. Thompson, the pre-eminent British photogrammetrist, died 25 years ago. His memory has been perpetuated in several ways. An analogy is drawn between the design of a 21st century digital air survey camera and that of Thompson's multi-lens camera of the 1930s.     

THE VIVIAN THOMPSON STEREO-PLANIGRAPH

This short paper describes a design, hitherto unpublished, for an automatic stereoplotter conceived by Captain Vivian Thompson?, Royal Engineers, in 1908.     

GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND PHOTOGRAMMETRY ORGANISATIONAL ISSUES

This paper was presented at the 1990 Thompson Symposium. It distinguishes between geographical information systems (GIS) as a set of hardware and software tools and the institutional problems that arise when implementing GIS in an organisational environment. It examines issues such as data quality, that arise when treating information as a corporate resource, as well as the legal, economic and social constraints on the use of data.     

THE FUTURE PROSPECTS OF DATA ACQUISITION BY PHOTOGRAPHIC AND OTHER AIRBORNE SYSTEMS FOR LARGE SCALE MAPPING

This paper was the first to be presented at the Thompson Symposium 1984 which had as its theme “The future of photogrammetry”. The paper considers only the acquisition of imagery for large scale mapping and similar purposes. It discusses the role of the standard metric aerial survey camera and makes some proposals for the wider use of smaller format cameras. It also reviews the position with regard to other possible sources of imagery such as vidicon and solid state cameras.     

Spatiotemporal analysis of photo contribution patterns to Panoramio and Flickr

ABSTRACT

Photo-sharing services provide a rich resource of crowdsourced spatial data consisting of georeferenced imagery and metadata. Shared photos can provide valuable information for a variety of applications and geospatial analysis tasks, such as identifying tourist hot spots or traveled routes. Understanding the spatiotemporal patterns of photo contributions will allow analysts to assess the suitability of these data for related analysis tasks. Using California as a study area, this paper analyzes various aspects of photo contribution patterns of Panoramio and Flickr. It identifies areas where annual photo contributions are still growing and areas that undergo a decline in annual contributions. Multiple regression is used to identify which environmental correlates are associated with an increase in photo-sharing activities. Furthermore, panel data of annual contributions between 2006 and 2013 for California subcounties will be used in a regression model to demonstrate that there is a positive feedback effect between Panoramio and Flickr photo contributions, but no neighborhood effect. The results of this paper provide insight into the data quality of crowdsourced image collections. These collections are commonly used for geospatial applications, including tourist information services and the computation of scenic routes.     

组件与服务耦合的地学模型集成方法与实现

传统的空间信息处理建模工具,如ArcGIS ModelBuilder,聚焦于地理空间信息处理算子的组合建模。“模型网”的提出对已有的空间信息处理建模工具提出了新的挑战,一方面,现有的空间信息处理建模工具需要能够支持网络环境,支持空间信息服务的即插即用;另一方面,服务需要与复杂地学模型耦合,支持基于时间步长的地学模型运行。针对组件与服务并存的现状以及异构模型和算法兼容性差等问题,提出了组件与服务耦合的地学模型集成方法;并从“模型即服务”和模型集成需求出发,提出了基于WebSocket协议发布地学模型的新方法,实现了基于时间步长的地学模型在线共享。采用科学工作流技术实现了遵循国际开放地理空间信息联盟（Open Geospatial Consortium,OGC）标准的空间信息服务、基于WebSocket协议的地学模型服务、遵循OpenMI开放建模接口规范的模型组件集成,具有逻辑一致、物理分隔、执行可控等特点。利用该方法将传统的空间信息处理建模工具拓展为地学模型集成工具,并应用于具体案例中,验证了方法的可行性。     

THE HEIGHT ADJUSTMENT OF A SINGLE STRIP

This note represents an extension of some earlier work on the plan adjustment of a fully controlled strip (Thompson, 1967). A similar method was developed for the height adjustment. Unlike other adjustment methods using polynomials, both plan and height adjustment formulae are very simple, so that adjustment can be rapidly carried out by hand computation.     

Angular momentum of Arctic Ocean tides

Oceanic tidal angular momentum (OTAM) is calculated for the four major tides of the Arctic Ocean, based on the tidal elevations and current velocities from a recent two-dimensional numerical hydrodynamic model. The presented OTAM tables are meant to be complementary to other modeling studies that use satellite altimetry (which cannot observe Arctic Ocean tides because of ice cover and limited satellite inclinations). Although the Arctic Ocean's influence on earth rotation is, as may be expected, relatively small, the rapid advancement of the subject now calls for such small contributions to be explicitly accounted for. Received: 22 January 1996; Accepted: 5 December 1996     

The Photogrammetric Society Analogue Instrument Project: A Ninth Extract

The paper entitled The Photogrammetric Society Analogue Instrument Project was published in The Photogrammetric Record 14(82): 565-582 (October 1993). Extracts have appeared in each subsequent issue such that all the standard types of analogue instruments mentioned in the catalogue have now been included, some 28 instruments in all. In this final extract, the three remaining instruments listed in the catalogue are dealt with. All are of a type usually known as approximate solution instruments because they did not attempt any form of accurate space intersection but relied on applying a number of corrections to a model formed on the assumption that the photographs being used were true verticals taken at the same altitude. The accuracies achieved by such instruments depended both on how close the photography being used was to this ideal situation and on the degree of sophistication in the design of the analogue correctors incorporated in any particular instrument. The raison d'être for such a genre of instrument was essentially one of cost. Any organization faced with the requirement to produce small scale topographic mapping of an extensive region within a reasonable period of time might consider spending its available funds on a larger number of cheaper approximate solution instruments, always provided that an acceptable degree of accuracy could be maintained. Fortunately for such projects the specification would normally be for mapping of a graphical order of accuracy produced from high altitude photography. At such altitudes, stable flying conditions and small camera tilts of the order of 3° to 4° could realistically be expected. However, to obtain the best possible results from such photography, the best images possible should be provided for the operator, a factor sometimes overlooked by some manufacturers in their attempts to produce cheaper instruments. In view of the background to the development of British photogrammetry mentioned in previous extracts, it is perhaps surprising that a successful instrument of this type was not produced in the UK at a much earlier point in the era of analogue photogrammetry. Approximate methods were certainly favoured and promoted but only as far as planimetric maps were concerned. For these, form lines rather than contours were drawn when height information was considered necessary. However, when it was finally produced, the Thompson CP1 (manufactured by Cartographic Engineering Ltd.) proved to be an excellent instrument of its type and less approximate in its solution than most of its competitors. The other two instruments described in this extract are the Zeiss Stereotope and the Galileo-Santoni Stereomicrometer. The instruments are introduced in the order of their appearance on the market, which is also the order of the degree of sophistication found in the analogue computers they employed to reduce the errors introduced by any camera and airbase tilt present in the photography.