GeoVantage Displays Evolutionary Technology, Revolutionary Concept

By Senior ANN Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

Andy has flown a lot of missions in the Cardinal. "I have a lot of test flights programmed in here," he explained. He frequently flies to check out changes to the camera unit of the software. "My co-workers' houses, mostly. I think I have the coordinates of every GeoVantage employee's house..."

The pilot does have to arm the system and select the mission to be flown. Rather than a touch screen, the system works with an ordinary flat-panel monitor and a regular mouse. "We use these now," Andy said, pointing at a generic 15-inch flat panel. "They're cheap. We tried touch screens," Andy said. "They were always breaking. They are heavy, thick, and expensive. And they break a lot. At one point we needed to make a flight and the touch screen was broken. So we sent somebody to a computer store to get a regular Microsoft mouse... it worked so well we stuck with it." The buttons are large, easy to read -- and click -- in flight.

The Desktop Side

When the pilot completes his course -- he can see this on the generic 15-inch monitor -- he heads for the barn, and possibly his part of the mission is over. But the development of the imagery is just beginning.

The removable HD in the computer in the plane contains ".IMG" files, which contain all images, and ".IMU" files which contain the DGPS and IMU data. All these data together contain most of what is necessary to process the pictures into an exact georeferenced image.

At the processing location, which can be as simple as a USB external removable-drive dock attached to a laptop (which is how Andy demoed it) or as complex as you like, a technician (maybe even the pilot) docks the removable drive and runs GeoTrace, a proprietary program of GeoVantage's.

In GeoTrace, you load the IMG and IMU files just like loading documents into Word or Excel. GeoTrace also incorporates digital terrain elevation data, which lets it correct for the vertical variation in the terrain. With these inputs, it stitches and "rectifies" the images into a single photomosaic. Under the hood, it's all number crunching:
considering the variables, this has to be the worst trigonometry program I ever heard of, and my hair follicles ache just to think of it. But the incredible power of modern computers means that in just minutes GeoTrace produces an absolutely exact, georeferenced image of the target area.

"Georeferenced" is the important concept here. Because the industry-standard output file contains the image and has it located absolutely in reference to the physical world, it can be imported into many GIS applications such as ArcView. The utility of this is almost endless -- you can easily determine very exact positions of anything in the picture. You can determine the distance and azimuth from one item to another with laser accuracy. You can determine the area of a stand of trees or wetland. And you can do all this with a few clicks of the mouse.

A GeoVantage image appears as a single image, even though it was made from a mosaic of many images -- it lacks the dividing lines and changes in exposure that you've probably seen in military photomosaics.

Ideas come tumbling, unbidden: there are an awful lot of uses I can imagine for this slick technology. Andy grins: he can see people starting to get it.

The Presentation Wraps

The presentation concluded with a Q&A session; the attendees included GeoVantage staff from CEO Staffan Ericsson on down, local and national media, Boston-area GIS professionals, at least one professional surveyor who was excited about the utility of a tool like this, and not least, local pilots, many of whom already knew Andy Lee.

A few hints of the future included a look at a mock-up of a next-generation camera, and some hints at future, wider applications.

For Andy, having a job that requires occasional flying is a very good deal; he's one of those guys that doesn't really need a reason for flying -- a flimsy excuse will do. His father, Bill Lee, has been bitten by the flying bug, too, and was coming in later that day for a lesson. "He keeps asking when he gets to fly 'our' plane," Andy says wryly. "When did it become 'our' plane?"

GeoVantage is a privately held corporation, established by long-time remote imaging professionals in 1998. It's home-based in Swampscott, Mass, on the Atlantic Ocean, and provides its imagery as a service to customers worldwide, in forestry, agriculture, environmental science, and urban planning sectors.

General Aviation Services, where the event was held, is a full-service FBO that is celebrating its 20th year at Beverly Airport. (Its offices are in a landmark hangar dating to 1928, although the Navy moved it 100 yards to its current location in 1941 -- no sense of history, the Navy). It offers fuel, Part 135 charters, a Part 145 maintenance shop, flight training, and aircraft rental, hangars and tie-downs.

FMI: www.geovantage.com