Integrating spatial information and image analysis - one plus one makes ten

Photogrammetry and remote sensing have proven their efficiency for spatial data collection in many ways. Interactive mapping at digital workstations is performed by skilled operators, which guarantees excellent quality in particular of the geometric data. In this way, worldwide acquisition of a large number of national GIS databases has been supported and still a lot of production effort is devoted to this task. In the field of image analysis, it has become evident that algorithms for scene interpretation and 3D reconstruction of topographic objects, which rely on a single data source, cannot function efficiently. Research in two directions promises to be more successful. Multiple, largely complementary, sensor data like range data from laser scanners, SAR and panchromatic or multi-/hyper-spectral aerial images have been used to achieve robustness and better performance in image analysis. On the other hand, given GIS databases, e.g. layers from topographic maps, can be considered as vi...