An overview of 20 years of Phase One aerial surveying sensor integration by GGS | Phase One
okay hello good morning good afternoon good evening welcome everyone to the may 2021 monthly webinar series from phase one um our today's webinar is made together with our integration partner dgs from germany and we will get a tour of 20 years of history ggs integrating phase one technology let me introduce you today's presenter my name is carson visa i'm part of the phase one sales team since more than 12 years and since quite some time acting as integrator sales manager i'm based in cologne in germany from ggs i welcome dr gerhard kemper who is founder and ceo of the company gts was founded in 1998 and today a team of around 12 people is specialized in integrating aerial service server equipment welcome gerhart hello carson thank you for the introduction so yeah before we um before i hand over the presentation to gerhard to give let him give a short overview um i will give you a short overview about our corporate and products phase one is a world leading provider of digital medium format imaging solutions founded in 1993 in denmark we provide ultra high resolution cameras in highly productive software solutions we operate several sales and support centers for phase one across the globe in denver colorado it is for the americas region in cologne in germany for emea region in australia and in hong kong we operate an office for asia and south pacific regions our company headquarters is based in copenhagen in denmark together with our main r d center and further r d and production centers we operate in israel and in japan in addition we have more than 50 distribution partners which offers a global network of sales and support centers which makes us a fully customer-centric organization offering 24 7 customer support yeah we really serve the world leading brands with top image quality and productivity in various applications let me give you a short overview about our phase one aerial products so phase one has been supplying specialized cameras for a while and and a wide range of aerial photography applications starting in 2012. those cameras are always made on the edge of technology by using the most modern cmos or most modern sensors available on the market delivering the best possible image quality over the years we have continuously developed these products to meet their market requirements the journey started with the xa camera an 18-megapixel medium format camera based on ccd sensor technology it continued with special specialized designed lenses as well as the first cmos based medium format camera in 2014. from that moment the ixu camera family with its smaller size and weight together with many new features grew our customer in store base further in the ixu a series was then completed by the reliable industry the unique rs shutter system and the 4-band kits in 2017 we introduced the phase one area systems a fully integrated turnkey solution it contains also our first large format camera with 190 megapixel in 2018 then a full new camera series was released the ix-m series uh it delivered a complete new camera architecture with high even higher capture rates and additional new features furthermore the cameras are equipped with the latest cmos esi sensors phase one is the first company in the market introduced these new 150 megapixel sensors two years ahead of all other competitors the xm camera also brought a new possibility for uav applications and the ax mrs is the new king of aerial digital medium format last year we announced the ps280 a large format area system is 280 megapixel and more than 20 20 000 pixel crosstrack resolution a further addition to the ps system is the release of our new flagship model the ps80 which was just announced end of 2020. it is the first phase one large format and
oblique camera system with 280 megapixel nadia view and four times 150 megapixels of big view the cameras of the ixm series can be easily ma integrated and used with in a wide variety of aircraft due to the its size and weight the ixm is ideal for all unmanned drones or anywhere where size and weight matters the cameras of the ix mrs series with their even higher resolution are part of the of our phase one area system but also are built into a wide a varied variety of aerial imaging systems and made by many other integrators around the world these cameras are also often a part of urban lidar systems and helicopter based systems for optical inspections the xm series cameras are often used in drones and inspection applications such as inspection of bridges and roads pipelines railway wind turbines power lines in agriculture and phenotyping applications as well as in mapping applications that require highest level of accuracy the xmrs models are mostly used on the larger areas in manned aircrafts also for mappings application in agriculture and forestry as well as environmental monitoring for these 3d city models and next to airborne lighting systems and also for inspection yeah but now it's time to hand over the presentation to gerhart kemper from ggs let's see various examples how ggs uses phase one technology in the last 20 years and today so thank you gerrard for joining and yeah so please continue thank you carson and also welcome everybody around the world visiting us so just checking the okay it's moving forward okay that's my short agenda for today a short introduction to our company so we are this year already 32 years on the market and uh yeah we what we deliver is a all-in-one solutions we have meanwhile 50 employees so and we do a lot of things in integrating cameras different sensors stabilizers flight management system and we provide ready to use complete systems just today we had our second following audit from the suit and we are iso 9001 certificated company so we have a quality management system in-house and that allows us to deal also with big partners like seaman's and others our location our headquarter is in schweier in the western part of germany we will move over our r d and headquarter in q3 to reson book in france so we have better place more environmental possibilities to enlarge our workshop and everything uh we have opened our branch in turkey in the fall card towers in izmir and we are going to do also something a little bit like a developing strategy as a us competence center in namibia and we are looking there with partners to get some training and give the people there something on hands to do their own business we have partners all around the world who are our resellers and we have many partners who deal with us with their senders and the integration partners components for the turnkey solutions i will jump a bit in the history how we came to this job so we started in 1988 with meteorological centers and equipment for soil geology and others and we did already that time with typical theodolites the first digital terrain models it was the time when just the first ideas of gis came up and photogrammetry was still on let's say more manual digital plotters and some years later in 1997 we started with the first differential gps systems and reached already two meter accuracy and used that for gis data combination and of course everything was correct at that time because normal gps was about 100 meter unaccurate we followed up with the first combination of gps and different sensors for example echo sounder ph value measurement and conductivity and we measured for example lakes for the water quality and created already the first 3d sub sea level terrain models we jumped already 2001 with our handheld gps and already the first maps with that have been gis and gps supported for power line monitoring it was still manual so it was let's say yeah looking for isolators for damages visually and put that into the geodatabase 2002 we used already gps but still with analog cameras we used for example here the rolex matrix camera with resole plates for measuring in photochromic methods and we use already color infrared rgb uh systems and everything was already controlled by gps that time so it was the first attempt of flight management system we already did something on uav technology because we wanted to create high resolution digital data that time we used balloons as a photogrammetric carrier and we had here already a stabilized digital camera with 4 megapixels remote control and that's the terrain model with the modern software which was created out of this model that was the theater in patara in turkey we did something similar already with a phase one digital back on a roller matrix camera in 2003 it was also a balloon mission over the acropolis in athens that time there were no drones what we know up to today and here we used already genus s and bluetooth communication but it was still let's say fixed balloon with two ropes and we reached gsd of five millimeter that's time and in 2004 we f5 we started with the first stabilizer still let's say a bit handcraft workshop with a roller matrix phase one camera with 22 megapixel it was really the best that time what was available and we used that in a zeppelin a remote controlled in china and we got the first let's say aerial mid-format results in these days it lead it up in 2005 to improve the stabilizer the communication and use also tri-row senders for the stabilization and direct referencing and it leaded that we've flown with the first ultralight aircraft in china that time and 2008 we used already the first combination of mid-format camera with a p25 digital back and modified nikons for red edge detection it was a five band solution and it resulted of course in some deep wiring of the near infrared canals and results in a red edge detection mapping of a test site in switzerland to generate let's say the right fertilizers and some sickness of plants and these things our integration so the first turnkey solution we sold was again to china used in a trike it was already our first or second model of stabilizers with a roller matrix with the p20 45 39 megapixel digital back and was mounted in the trike and we've flown the first missions successfully and the system increased and was a long time operational also for measuring or detecting the damages of the seizure on earthquake that time uh 2009 we used the first dual camera setup for wide aria mapping with two roller matric p45 cameras mounted under a certain angle with a certain overlap and stitching software and it was mounted in the surveying aircraft of the ign of panama and we performed a calibration flight very close to the panama canal 2012 we are already in the phase one history of the young phase one development it was the first digital complete photogrammetry camera the ixa 180 and we already combined their three cameras of that for a wide area mapping in sudan with the three cameras and we already had the synthetic frame of 26800 pixels cross and it was mounted on our stabilizer aerostat twin with the nova tail span uh genus as ins and our flight management system and we created 30 centimeter gsd through orthophotos of the nile area 2014 we had the installation for the daisy a seabird monitoring system uh the request was a high resolution to detect the types and numbers of seabirds and the system operated well with many images also detecting other animals and we had 1.5 centimeters gsd already in this times and the system already is now upgraded to the latest phase one technology with longer focal lenses 215 we installed our first oblique system with 4i xu50 and the ixu 1000 as a nadia camera for link fast in taiwan and 2016 we used the four band system installed at the aircraft of the aerial surveys limited company and we did the first missions with this system and in 2018 we installed our oblique imaging system l with a four band system and did a calibration in spire that results in two flight altitudes cross flight tie point matching adjustment in bingo and getting for each camera the calibration parameters and reduce the distortion with additional parameters so that is something what we typically do when we deliver a system ready directly to start with missions that is ready calibrated using bingo for let's say the best possible results 2019 we installed eight camera system for open skies in romania and it's designed to fly at three different altitudes to get a maximum resolution of 30 centimeters and for each flight level we have a four band solution that's the nice aircraft and i would be happy to have more such aircrafts to install the technology because we have a lot of space and more comfortable to fly but in many cases it's relatively small aircrafts just enough to get the system nicely mounted yeah the system of course in romania is a quite complex one with many monitors for the observers and the controllers and the different camera setups to get them uh set up differently so you see the systems get quite complex that time what components do we use today and which components do we integrate of course there are the different phase one cameras the 280 150 and 100 megapixel camera with the different lenses that we are integrating we are using different thermal cameras some of them with industrial standards some of them steering cooled for very high resolution and fast capture rates we use ultraviolet cameras from different brands meantime more from proxy vision with amplified detection and daylight filters and they are typically used for corona discharges on power lines and we combine them for example with rgb cameras and other thermal cameras we integrate the different regal scanners we did a lot in the last two years on that basis and of course the integration is done also with hyper spectral senders for different applications five band and multi-band solutions we have our stabilizing platforms our small one for a single camera solution the aerostat m that can carry for example a 280 plus new infrared sensor or the aerostat xl that is the biggest let's say on the market with 42 centimeters that is able to carry also big oblique systems and of course we have all the range of gnss and ins systems to integrate them uh our aerodynas our direct integration uh and registration system we are using components from novatel and aplenix and we have them from let's say low grade to ultra hybrid depending on the request our mission planning software develops more and more we do a lot of things on the power line monitoring and have developed also specific tools for this one and we have also the navigation part as a flight management system that's guiding the pilot through all the missions with a moving map and also instruments and collecting the data from each snapshot we do things of course with the phase one four band solution and we integrate also five band solution for detecting within the infrared you can see in the sample the rgb then the infrared and the ndvi resolution we do missions in with emissions in different altitudes to check the systems to detect if we get the right speed if we capture everything in a certain quality zooming into some parts we also can if there is clear water to look also deeper into the environment and detecting also the breed places of of mosquitoes close to the rhine here the combination of rgb and thermal infrared seems to be a bit unlogic but it makes a lot of sense when you see also in daylight conditions the thermal radiation because it indicates where you have good areas for solar energy it also indicates where you have certain environmental issues and we combine it of course with our flight management system because the thermal camera needs some special dealing with recalibration and so on we have integrated interface for that and that's a combined result for example the thermal image overlaid over also photo and you can see the urban green it's very very extreme as a cooling effect and you can see uh the south uh explanated roofs in the aspect that shows you also the different uh let's say thermal radiation and effects of urban climate public imaging system it's also one of our big components we have a certain range of small medium large and four band systems and i thought it would present our latest baby which contains a 280 megapixel nadia camera from phase one 450 megapixel camera as oblique plus uh thermal cameras uh for the for the urban heat detection that's like how the system is looking like so you can see here the 280 megapixel camera the near infrared nadia camera the oblique cameras and the thermal cameras that capture of course in the far less accuracy and resolution but detects of course the urban heat effects these are the footprints of the different sensors calculated now for five centimeter gsd and that's the range of gsd that's affected by the oblique view but i don't want to go too far into the details and what you are able to capture are data of 3 centimeter gsd depending on the on the speed of the cameras uh yeah you can reach also two centimeters but with one centimeter of course depending on the flight speed there are limits on the capture rate some examples of photos what we have in two centimeter gsd and that's definitely impressing what you can detect here and that's also one effect where you can see very good finally on the thermal images if these solar panels are operating in the health stages or if their repair should be done this is a 3d model on the left hand side i'm just going back so it's not the image it's really a 3d city model of the city of spire which we use typically for calibrating the system we have over 100 control points in this area and for 3d cd models it's a very nice test site that's a nice test site i will show later a short presentation of this aria of wissombor in france also a 3d model which we captured with our oblique imaging system and we did also with our drone on this part multicenter integration it can be also a deeper integration that's what we typically do on the power line monitoring system what we did with siemens we've integrated their 500 megapixel cameras to capture with the two millimeter gsd the power line and the infrastructure we have lidar that collects 250 points per square meter three thermal cameras a corona camera direct referencing and in that example we have also exacto electromagnetic detector that's a digital twin calculated out of the data glider and aerial images and what you see is a very detailed resolution that enables also ai technology to detect automatically some failures some issues some findings on the power line now look such a system of course you have a flight management system that especially has tools for snake line flights to follow the line without entering separately you have the genus as ins as the central heart of it we have the camera setup in the daisy chain we have the thermal cameras that are synchronized they have our own let's say controller unit we have a corona camera that captures images with a 50 hertz frame rate combined with the rgb camera we have of course a lidar system and of course a central storage and control monitor for the operator that's the sensor heads that we have developed for siemens which is actually today in policy coldstream in operation we also did integrations payload integrations for swiss drones for example here with three rgb and thermal cameras to capture data in a very high resolution on on a test site here in switzerland we also have since two years our own uav development we have two uavs the aerospector and the aerospect s for different payloads the aerospector is our bigger baby actually it's designed mainly to carry let's say several senders for example a regal boxes and a high resolution camera or gimbal for stabilizing or as a smart gimbal solution and of course for the wide aria mapping inspection monitoring and surveillance applications that's one test mission we did with the system two years ago you can see the drone even it's a quite big baby over a power line in hundred meters it looks relatively small that's why it's marked here and we capture here a power line pole and you see here on the image already marked some findings on the isolators and that's the laser model generated with the boxes smart gimbal solution that's also a new development where we are still working on it so we have at the moment two gimbals under construction a small one for a single camera you see on the left side down here that's our small gimbal and that's our bigger gimbal three axis and what is a smart gimbal i would like to shortly explain it here so it's a system that not only balances the sensors in a for roll pitch and heading movement it's also active it means it's checking for points of interest you can see when you are flying by that the system rotates to the point of interest and focus the next one that's important for flat terrain but more even on the hilly terrain where it can follow the terrain while for example a helicopter uv is climbing and descending and still has the object into the focus and into the view we already have made some integration of different images captured by aerial systems for example our oblique imaging system and the combination with the uav data and i want to show shortly something on this picture you can see here the uav images captured and here an example that's the result of the oblique imaging system with five centimeter resolution and here five millimeter uav data and we can combine them into one model i think i should share my screen now so here our presenter yep so is it possible to see my screen yes okay see it okay so that's a three 3d city model of wissom and i want to show you here this that the palace stanislas it's under reconstruction and you see here it's already a very nice let's say 3d model of the roof but when you zoom in the quality gets bad and when i switch to the uav captured data which is now a model inside the wider model you can zoom in and you see here a lot of small details and especially for such kind of objects when you want to have more resolution for cultural heritage it's a very nice let's say combination of this kind of data you don't need that of course for a whole city that would be a data volume which is not possible to handle but i think for this specific objects you see far more details and it can be used of course for all this archaeological and conservation purposes okay carson you can take over again okay okay so we're back to the presentation yep okay i'm into forward it's not moving okay try once more yep okay yeah i'm already at the outlook and new developments uh we are working on newer faster and more integrated mapping senders for example also on the oblique imaging system we are already in the process to optimize optimize the workflow it means from planning data capturing to the processing so that the things are more smooth more integrated and yeah the idea is to have everything let's say in one environment that you don't have to deal with different data sources and just let's say plan fly and have every data together for the processing for example in skyline software we develop new tools for mission planning and navigation especially for power lines we already did a lot of that in the past we are using new ptp sensors it's precise time protocol to integrate and synchronize sensors to genus s time so we have a lot of experience meanwhile uh in this data combination and to get the camera synchronized and that was always in the past because the many of these industrial cameras work like a video stream and it's hard to synchronize them and we found out that this tp ptp we get everything on the same genus as time as the other senders like lidar and the phase one cameras as well we have also reached a good value in real-time overlaying and error detection in the ua in the uv band and we develop a wider range of smart gimbals also for other uavs and helicopters we also thinking on tools to use autonomous ua missions uh to combine them with 5g technology we are entering a project for firebird that drone itself can try to detect a fire nest and automatically try to find and fly close to this area and give the informations with a video stream to a central let's say a disaster server and we do also implementations to control uav swamps with different sensors with coalition sensors and we are working on that field in the future as well that's everything from my side at the moment four questions yeah so as always after a webinar we have some time free for questions from the audience so i will now welcome gina my colleague she will hopefully have some questions collected and yes thanks carson we do have um several questions um in the audience and i think we're just going to start with our first one which is um looking at the open sky system um question is whether it's a commercially available system that can be purchased as a campaign system so i thought you could hear the question because i don't understand but it's a very strange sound you should switch off your robot um yes the system from romania is actually commercially available there are no components which are let's say stripped is quite bad sadly yeah is um maybe keep it muted for the moment i will answer so the system from open skies it's more or less a commercial system of course it's customized for this specific purpose but there is nothing let's say hidden or forbidden or very secret parts which can't be shared to others so it's definitely an open and commercially available system okay thank you um tina can you try once more hopefully you can yeah yes the next question um i think i actually have two questions going into the same direction so we can just have a look at the rules at the same time but nice nice pictures and resolutions with great precision but um it's also creating a lot of data so it's my big data project so the question is like how to handle these amounts of data and now i don't i'm not sure if i understood right so uh a question about high resolution in combination with let's say more core resolution data um yeah i think that's definitely what i tried to show on this small 3d model of wisconsin that they you can capture something in the core resolution and then focus on a specific object why you definitely need this high resolution and i think that's definitely something for the future because we will not be able to handle such amount of data and it also makes no sense to have everything let's say an ultra high resolution okay yeah i'm very sorry for this noise a bit there's some technical problem we need to investigate so i hope the answer was found well from from gerhart and and yeah we try it once more tina do we have one further question yeah try to change some settings here's only that's what i'm better known um the next question is like combining close-range uav with um remote sensing narrow data is that something that's coming up in the future uh i'm sure that it will come in because we have learned that there are let's say to combine this data it was there are many uav data which are let's say isolated in the environment so it's just a single object and you can't see them let's say in in the wider context besides that especially this high resolution uav data they help for many applications uh in 3d city models for example also for tourist guidance where they want to see on beforehand let's say these objects in details and it also helps in the example of the palestinians also in the conservation and documentation process so i think that's something which comes up more and more especially because the uav technology has improved so fast and to deal with the data uh it's far more easy than let's say five six years ago so i think that's definitely something that pops up okay thank you gerhart so i just opened the question chatbox myself so i take over and we'll ask the questions now so i have one question received here um the drone do you have used to fly over urban areas which was it yeah it was in that case the aerospect s our smaller one with a single camera okay then i have one for another questions the the um solution you delivered 2006 to china if it's still in operation somebody asks uh yeah they just have let's say changed the camera from 39 megapixels uh some years ago to the 100 megapixel camera but the flight management system the stabilizer without any repairs or inspection it's still operational it's still there okay and then i have a more specific question this is related to uh the corona camera yeah when the camera is collecting images with 50 frames per second you mentioned how you get handle this huge amount of data uh yeah that's definitely a challenge so we have and we have two of them so we have the ultraviolet camera and the rgb camera roughly about 1.2 megapixels each and that's of course a data stream which is just enough to to handle it to to get it dealed and what we are doing is we on the fly we overlay them because the ultraviolet camera just collects let's say black and white it just collects single corona and photon blobs and so we superimpose them on one image and um at the moment we are working on the step that we analyze the data if there is um let's say some finding if there is something on the ultraviolet band if not we will delete let's say yeah more than uh 60 80 percent of the images just to store some images with some findings and if we have findings we of course collect the full frame rate as long as we have findings on the ultraviolet band so that reduces of course the data which we finally have to process and we get on the fly indicator that there is a finding and operator can view okay this isolator creates some corona effect that's that's a nice thing that's a big step we did this year okay and i have another question as you showed the example of the oblique data set which is uh was collected with five centimeter gsd and you showed the example for combined uav data which you put into these data sets do you see this as a common new application for the future and can you name further applications where this is from use yeah i see especially for 3d city models i think i mentioned it already a big demand on that because some objects you want to have in this ultra high resolution also for let's say touristic applications for checking for let's say repairs that have to be done we did it also in visual work for some other facade which is other roof which is actually under reconstruction and it also helps to let's say document or reconstruction steps and you want to see all this data in a wider environment that can be done also with let's say wind turbines when you have this data or you can use this data also as a sample for modeling let's say new wind farms how they influence the landscape i think this combination is a very interesting one because the advantage of a uav is that you can collect data in a very high resolution and the disadvantage of uav is that you cannot cover let's say bigger aria that's definitely let's say the combination of both ariel survey and this type of data is is i think the future okay thank you um i think these were all questions so far but if they are coming further question in your mind later on so you see the email addresses for myself and from dr garrett camper here on the on the screen so feel free to to drop an email if you have further questions um let me see if this further arrives no so yeah then uh thanks very much for for all your informations gerhard you shared with us and and yeah hope to see you sometime again and so for today i would now uh close uh the webinar um so yeah thank you uh all to all viewers uh and also especially for gerhart for sharing all his uh informations uh thank you for joining this webinar and looking forward to see you again at the next webinar uh like always the webinar is recorded and will be provided here within the next two or three days on our website so you can go back and view it again or reference it to someone you know that also would like to see that yeah so thanks again okay thank you very much carsten and and thanks for the audience and and the questions and i'm happy to answer other questions popping up by email thank you very much good thank you thanks all and have yourself a wonderful and great day thanks a lot okay bye bye bye you
2021-05-21 01:54
