DSA Zoom Lecture

Aerial Mapping is the collection of information from an airborne platform, most notably Aerial Photography. Capturing and producing Aerial Photography is a complex and often challenging exercise, with ever busier skies, and in the UK at least, very varied weather. This presentation will focus on the aircraft and camera technologies used to capture country-wide aerial photography datasets, the logistics involved in organising and planning capture on that scale, and the created products and applications.

David Philpot joined Geosense Ltd in 2005, shortly after they purchased their first digital camera system, and helped establish the image processing workflow for their Digital Aerial Photography production program. He was responsible for various aerial photography projects, including work in Europe, Africa and North America, working closely with its flight operations team on flight planning (occasionally taking to the skies as a camera operator). Also, he undertook ground control survey work, particularly in the more remote parts of Scotland. Geosense merged with Getmapping in 2011, and since then, David has worked as a Project Manager for the combined company, running aerial photography contracts, including the 'Aerial Photography for Scotland' programme for the Scottish Government, the Integrated Data Capture programme for Ordnance Survey and an update programme for Defra. From 2016 to 2019, he also managed Aerial Survey projects for the Danish and Dutch Governments, as Getmapping expanded its activities into Europe. In 2019 David managed a project to capture oblique imagery and LiDAR data of the Netherlands' whole for the Dutch company Cyclomedia. He is currently working on a 4-year project to maintain an entire UK imagery layer for the UK Government. With a solid technical background, David is closely involved with all aspects of the flight operations and production processes on the projects he manages.