Small Format Aerial Photography – Remote Sensing Data Acquisition For Environmental Analysis

Since February 2008, an advanced system has been developed to acquire digital images in the visible to near infrared wavelengths. Using this system, it is possible to acquire data for a large variety of applications. The core of the system consists of a Duncantech MS3100 CIR (Color-InfraRed) multi-spectral camera. The main advantages of the system are its affordability and flexibility; within an hour the system can be deployed against very competitive costs. In several steps, using ArcGIS, Python and Avenue scripts, the raw data is semi-automatically processed into geo-referenced mosaics. This paper presents the parts of the system, the image processing workflow and several potential applications of the images.