Studies on DMC geometry

Since the ISPRS Congress 2000 in Amsterdam, there are great expectations in matrix-CCD based digital cameras for aerial photogrammetry and mapping applications. During the last two years the number of DMC cameras in the market has raised significantly (32 cameras were sold until March 2006). This paper discusses the DMC accuracy focusing on the role of self-calibration parameters and the assessment of automatic DEM quality. This investigation concluded that under the current status of DMC an appropriate set of self-calibration parameters is necessary in order to achieve theoretical accuracy and precision, which were discussed in early literature.In the following discussions, the accuracy of the DMC is analyzed comparing its performance in automatic DEM generation to that of an analog camera using a Lidar DEM as reference. Despite the fact that the higher image quality of the DMC should overcome the poorer base-to-height ratio, the presented results did not reach the expected accuracies. However, our current study is not yet conclusive on this topic because the DMC, the analog images and the LIDAR data have not been acquired at the same time.