Georeferencing Accuracy Assessment of Historical Aerial Photos Using a Custom-Built Online Georeferencing Tool

As one of the earliest forms of remote sensing, aerial photography has been regarded as an important part of the mapmaking process. Aerial photos, especially historical aerial photos, provide significant amount of valuable information for many applications and fields. However, due to limited funding...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inISPRS international journal of geo-information Vol. 11; no. 12; p. 582
Main Authors Zhang, Su, Barrett, Hays A., Baros, Shirley V., Neville, Paul R. H., Talasila, Sandeep, Sinclair, Lisa L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.12.2022
Subjects
Accuracy
accuracy assessment
Aerial photography
Applications programs
Archives & records
Cartography
Coordinate transformations
custom-built
Digital cameras
Digital imaging
Digitization
Geographic information systems
Geographical information systems
historical aerial photos
Image processing
Information sources
Labour
online georeferencing
Open source software
Photogrammetry
Public domain
Remote sensing
Software
Unmanned aerial vehicles
United States > US
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Summary:As one of the earliest forms of remote sensing, aerial photography has been regarded as an important part of the mapmaking process. Aerial photos, especially historical aerial photos, provide significant amount of valuable information for many applications and fields. However, due to limited funding support, most historical aerial photos have not been digitized and georeferenced yet, which substantially limits their utility for today’s computer-based image processing and analysis. Traditionally, historical aerial photos are georeferenced with desktop GIS software applications. However, this method is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. To address these limitations, this research developed a custom-built online georeferencing tool to enable georeferencing digitized historical aerial photos in a web environment, which is able to georeference historical aerial photos in a rapid and cost-effective manner. To evaluate the georeferencing performance, a set of 50 historical aerial photos were georeferenced with not only the developed online georeferencing tool but also two commercial desktop software programs. Research results revealed the custom-built online georeferencing tool provided the highest degree of accuracy while maximizing its accessibility.
ISSN:2220-9964
2220-9964
DOI:10.3390/ijgi11120582