This is the first project where BlueSky has used one of the latest large format digital cameras for the aerial survey. The resulting imagery, which is being supplied to Leicester City Council, provides an impressive level of ground detail.

Aerial photography is in wide use across Leicester City Council, served up to over 100 GIS users and many more using browser-based web mapping on the Council's intranet. 'The clarity of the latest imagery is very impressive,' said Ian Robertson, Leicester City Council's Information Services Manager.  'It is a further improvement on the previous imagery that we have used. The high-resolution data enables our highways staff to pick out items of street furniture and highway markings, and the parks service uses it for estimating quantities for grounds maintenance contracts. In the latter case, the imagery shows the location and coverage of soft landscaping, trees and borders. The aerial photography also aids the efficiency of staff because it can be used as an alternative to going out on site. The latest data now means that we have a time series covering 10 years so that it can be used as evidence for planning infringements and boundary disputes' continued Robertson.

'There is a considerable time saving for us with imagery produced by a Vexcel digital camera', said James Eddy, BlueSky's Technical Director. 'With no film to process or scan we can get on with the colour balancing, ortho work and mosaicing as soon as we have the data back from the aircraft which also means we can deliver data to our customers faster than before. We are very impressed with the imagery, it offers exceptional clarity and provides more information at this resolution.  10cm GSD (ground sampled distance), where each pixel in the image is equivalent to 10cm on the ground is very useful, providing a very high level of detail and digital is also free from the grain sometimes associated with film' continued Eddy.

BlueSky offers aerial survey using a range of remote sensing technologies from traditional film cameras to the latest digital cameras and line scanners. The Company also supplies many services associated with aerial photography production, photographic laboratory services, scanning, photogrammetry, plus GPS ground control collection. BlueSky supplies other remote sensing such as LIDAR, NEXTMap Britain elevation data, 3D building models, thermal surveys, oblique aerial photography and has access to a wide range of historic aerial photography.

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