Aerial photograph processing nears completion

Over the past few weeks we made good progress on geo-referencing the scans of the historic aerial photographs as scanned earlier during the project. We are happy to announce the first rough composites are finished, and visualized below.

The scrollable and zoomable map below shows an orthomosaic composite of aerial photos taken at the beginning of 1958, covering much of the village of Yangambi and the ongoing agricultural research at the time. The extend of the coverage is limited to the greater village area.The data presented is at approximately 1/2 to 1/4 of the true resolution of the images. Although georeferenced there remains a consistent offset to the west of roughly 50 - 100 m. The final processing will include additional detailed georeferencing, correcting for this bias.

Full flight paths (see bottom of blog post) have been composited into georeferenced geotiff files, which also need further precision referencing. Some of the flight paths could not be composited in full due to the lack of clear landscape features (due to the self similar nature of the forest). However, more than 90% of the scanned data was used in the final composites.