Overview of European developments in digital photogrammetric workstations

The current position of European Softcopy or Digital Photogrammetric Workstations (DPWS) in terms of operational systems as well as research and development activities is reviewed. These activities are reviewed and lead to a number of conclusions on the stae-of-the-art and on future trends. The major ones are: a DPWS is and will remain an interactive workstation, where the human operator handles less and less routine work, but stays responsible for verification and control. Digital orthoprojection is on the verge of becoming widely used in practice. Image matching techniques are applied in a number of DPWS for small-scale applications. The use of operational image understanding methods in DPWS has not yet been achieved. The incorporation of data from different sources, for example, optical and microwave imagery, is increasingly being recognized, as is the connection between DPWS and GIS. -from Authors