In the land information market, technological evolution always appears to some suppliers as a threat to their existence or the way they perform their services.  Contrarily, some users consider such evolution as an opportunity to get faster, reliable and cost effective services or products, not necessarily in this order. I believe that both points of view share true and false interpretations.

Consumers – as I refer to users in this paper – not suppliers, are those who are indeed responsible for the market to evolve technologically.  Consumers compel suppliers to invest highly in new equipment, improvements and developments so that the latter can keep up with the ubiquitous technological evolution.  In fact, there are different thoughts on this subject in the market.

Consumers who are mainly focused on greater profits choose to establish a policy based on always acquiring low-priced products, and ignore that this “careless option” inevitably leads to the dilapidation of the industry and consequent quality loss.  On the other hand, other consumers primarily seek quality, valuing quality over price.  They prefer to enjoy high quality, good delivery time, and are willing to pay fair prices, which may not necessarily mean higher prices, for better service.  This approach allows consumers to get products and services that are much more adequate to their needs.  Those popular expressions “every consumer has the supplier it deserves, and vice-versa” and “you get what you pay for” seem to fit our market.

Often times the same consumer may decide to acquire products or retain services in different manners. This fact emphasizes the importance to establish a better technical approach to deal with the purchase process, where technical and financial criteria can be properly pondered.

There are suppliers who play by the rules imposed by the consumers, whatever they are. Some prioritize to meet their customers’ financial needs, while others keep the precepts of good technique and offer compatible delivery time and prices.  Although all suppliers present themselves as the latter, the market is really divided and has extremes represented by those two different types.

In the beginning of the supply chain are the companies who invest in technical personnel and in technology (equipments).  These companies are not exclusively concerned about short term profits.  Their goals go beyond achieving revenues at any cost.  This attitude, based on remaining abreast and leveled with technology, contributes significantly to develop the industry because it galvanizes competitors to follow suit.  The biggest challenge for this type of company is to keep up with such technological developments: constant investments to train and maintain technical personnel updated the use of new and current equipments, the perpetual search for customer service excellence, and the best possible quality-delivery time-price combination.

Many examples could be cited. I propose to restrict the discussion to the topic of aerial surveys, where astonishing technological evolution is taking place. Let’s take the example of improvements concerning airborne sensors.

The Airborne LASER Scanning (ALS) has greatly developed in the recent years.  Currently, there are approximately 150 sensors operating worldwide.  The surveying frequency (pulse rate) has already reached 150 kHz – and perhaps, by the time you will be reading this article, it will have exceeded this number – against the 25 or 50 kHz now more currently used.  One hundred and fifty kHz allows to measure 150 thousand three-dimensional points of a terrain in one second intervals. The altimetric precision of those points are not dependent on this frequency.  In this new generation of sensors this higher frequency associated with better planimetric precision allows for not only a highly dense mass of land altimetric data, but also the possibility of having planimetric information from fully automated and semi-automated vectorization processes.  In some very specific engineering services not requiring images, mapping has been performed exclusively based on LASER data.

Last generation sensors, such as ALS50 by LEICA GEOSYSTEMS, allow flights to go as high as 6,000 meters as opposed to the previous generation limit of 3,500 meters, or a little bit more.  According to these new operation limits and use flexibility, the LASER option, definitely more optimized now, should be a competitive alternative when compared to the few options of the airborne RADAR devices.

The digital aerial cameras or sensors are at a technological level that they no longer represent the future, but only the present.  Some examples of the advantages of these aerial digital sensors are: images with multispectral resolution (RGB, panchromatic and near infrared bands) which are better than the current “so called” high resolution satellite images, faster products, no need of aerial films; no photographic laboratories and scanning, etc. In fact, there are already almost 100 aerial digital aerial sensors operating in the world.

The American Department of Agriculture has a program called NAIP (National Agriculture Imagery Program).  Under this program the government has been obtaining images of several American states.  Since 2004, one of the most utilized airborne digital sensors in NAIP is the ADS40 by LEICA.  This sensor can get images with 5 centimeters to a meter pixel geometric resolution.  For the imaging of the American states the pixel size chosen was one meter.  In other words, in the ‘land of the satellite images’, they opted for imagery with a digital sensor with a much lower resolution than that of the satellite images (0.6 to 1 meter).  This proves that the level of technological development of these sensors is superior to that of the sensors that collect orbital images.  In addition, contrarily to what many claim in the industry, it confirms the idea that to use satellite images does not mean "to use the highest technology".

Nowadays in Brazil – the largest territorial extension in Latin America – approximately five companies are operating aerial sensors produced in the last decade.  The others use sensors produced in the 50’s and later.  Now considered absolutely necessary, only recently were resources incorporated to aerial cameras.  Some examples of these resources are:  on-board electronics, FMC (Forward Motion Compensation), AMC (Angular Motion Compensation), 8 fiducial marks, gyro-stabilized suspension, etc.  Cameras that incorporate these resources, such as the famous RMK-TOP and the RC30, continue to be manufactured and there are guaranteed demand and use for them in the market for years to come. Those film based cameras can still take images with the best possible geometric resolution. These cameras use the same resources used in the new digital sensors, like the gyro-stabilized suspension and AMC.  However, former cameras may even have excellent optical-mechanic devices, but they have old-fashioned technologies and very limited resources.

In face of the evolving scenario, companies who do not seriously invest in updating their business technologically and technically will likely be drawn out of business.  Alternatively, in the best case, because of their significant technological gap, they may be relegated to operate at the end of the supply chain. The market provides some examples that illustrate these scenarios.

Valther Xavier Aguiar
is a cartographer engineer and the technical director at Esteio Engenharia e Aerolevantamentos S. A.  valther@esteio.com.br