Photogrammetry has technically evolved into the third generation. The science of
photogrammetry started with large opto-mechanical instruments, reflecting the mathematical recipes of 3D stereo compilation. The second generation of photogrammetry involved more elegant opto-electrical and computer controlled instrument designs. A total change in paradigm happened when digital imagery was introduced into the workflow. For this reason,
digital photogrammetry is still a youthful discipline, despite its long history
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Photogrammetry has technically evolved into the third generation. The science of photogrammetry started with large opto-mechanical instruments, reflecting the mathematical recipes of 3D stereo compilation. The second generation of photogrammetry involved more elegant opto-electrical and computer controlled instrument designs. A total change in paradigm happened when digital imagery was introduced into the workflow. For this reason, digital photogrammetry is still a youthful
discipline, despite its long history.
What happened to photogrammetry at the time they stepped into digital image processing? What is the impact of digital photography? How will the “digital world” continue to change the photogrammetric workflows?
Photogrammetrists have been slow to embrace, but more importantly, to drive digital technology. The result of this urge to stick with proven age-old methods has been a serious lapse in adoption of digital technology advantages from within the Photogrammetric community. When the rest of the computing world was designing computer vision techniques to automate road following or runway landings, the photogrammetry world was just learning to manually measure tie points over digital images. When clustered processors were in widespread use doing chemical breakdown analysis, or searching for medical abnormalities in hyper-spectral images, even simple multi-threaded applications were a rarity in photogrammetric circles, and certainly not widely desired.
