Keynote Address : the International Society for Photogrammetry And

Keynote Address The International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing-75 Years Old, or 75 Years Young GOTTFRIEDKONECNY, Uniuersity c$ Hnnnooer, F.R. Ger~nany ADIES AND GENTLEMEN.I am grateful for the dis- sphere, and he determined its average radius within L tinction of having been asked to prepare the 1% of accuracy. He thus became the first geodesist. keynote speech for the 1985 Annual Meeting of the Mathematical thought and survey practices American Society of Photogrammetry and the spread from Mesopotamia and the Nile to the areas American Congress on Surveying and Mapping. of Greek and Roman culture. Roman land surveys As a photogrammetrist, I am naturally concerned were a highly developed technique. Its practice was about matters dear to me and therefore I have interrupted by the fall of the Roman Empire be- chosen as the title of my talk "The International cause of invasion from the North and the introduc- Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing- tion of Christianity with its upcoming mysticism. 75 years old, or 75 years young." I have done this Therefore the oriental cultures then became re- for two reasons. Last year I became successor to sponsible for the further development of our disci- Fred Doyle, who ably represented the American plines. In the Arab world, astronomy and navigation Society of Photogrammetry as President of ISPRS became highly developed. Cartography, as a de- for four years from 1980 to 1984. Secondly, our or- scription of the earth's features on its surface, flour- ganization celebrates this year its 75th Anniversary. ished in China, long before this was the case in We photogrammetrists are officially in our third Europe. generation. Reason enough to look back on our ac- The European Renaissance period brought about complishments and to ask ourselves the question, a change in the occident. The preoccupation with whether we still have a future. the observation of the laws of nature permitted Ga- As photogrammetrists and people who are con- lileo, Copernicus and Newton to lay down the foun- cerned about remote sensing, we cannot work in dations of physics, on which geodesy and cartog- isolation. We are deeply interrelated with the other raphy are now based, and as a result of which the surveying and mapping fields, with which, as the New World was found, explored and settled. Posi- long standing tradition of the Annual Meeting tional Astronomy was the main observation tech- shows, we already form an unofficial union of sur- nique used by the Spanish, the Portuguese, the veying and mapping disciplines. It is in this context, Dutch and the British the world over in exploratory that photogrammetry and remote sensing are also of cartography. But soon more exact models for the concern to surveyors, geodesists and cartographers. figure of the earth were developed, and the new We know that surveyors were already in exis- observation technique introduced by Snellius called I tence, when the Babylonians and Assyrians were triangulation began to be used alongside with po- delimiting their irrigated fertile lands in the valleys sitional astronomy. of the Euphrates and the Tigris, which were their It was the French Academy of Sciences, which very existence. This tradition was continued in the initially defined the meter as a natural unit of Nile Valley. The Egyptians needed accurate surveys length, namely the 10 millionth's part of the quad- to build the pyramids in an attempt to make their rant of the Earth's ellipsoid. In doing so, it generated kings immortal gods. Surveys needed mathematical the first world wide geodetic research project. After thought, and this is why by pure observation Era- it failed, the meter was redefined by other physical tosthenes of Alexandria succeeded from observa- measures. But French academic thought in the tions of the sun, that the Earth must be like a survey discipline henceforth persisted in Conti- nental Europe and spread from there into other at least 10 times faster and 50 times more ecouom- parts of the world. It was Napoleon I who in the ically than the plane table; electronic distance mea- early 19th century imposed on his conquered re- surement, which permits control surveys to be done gions the thought of creating a fundamental geodetic at least 10 times faster and at least 20 times more network of a regular map coverage at large or ine- economically than triangulation; the use of the com- dium scale based on this network, and of intro- puter, which for the first time permitted to perform ducing an obligatory land register combined with a simultaneous adjustments of large geodetic and pho- land parcel map, called a cadastre, which can now togrammetric networks and improve the economy, be considered as the first land information system. the speed, the accuracy and the reliability of point The reasons why these thoughts were rarely in- determination by at least one order of magnitude. troduced in the New World did not stem from ob- More recently inertial and satellite technology have jections to the logical thought introduced by Na- made and are continuing to make an impactin geo- poleon. They were brought about by the incapacity detic point determination. of the survey methods of the 19th century to cover By these introductory remarks I hope to have large areas fast. It needed, for example, 100 years clarified that we photogrammetrists are, in general, to establish the Napoleonic cadastre and its large part of the surveying and mapping profession with scale map by triangulation and by plane table in which we have the same roots. If I now restrict Germany. myself to the development of photogrammetry It needed new technologies to make progress. proper I do this as an example for each of the survey Such technologies were and are still being devel- disciplines in an attempt to review our past and oped. To these have counted in the past: photo- present role and to see where we are going. grammetry, which is able to map over large areas A German proverb says: "Need is the mother of WAVE THEORY OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT INVENTIONS OF TECHNOLOGY CHEMISTRY ............ ............................................. ECONOMIC ELECTRICITY ........... GROWTH =&@ RECESSION TELEVISION NUCLEAR POWER TIME Flc:. 1. Wave theory of eco~iomicdevelopment. KEYNOTE ADDRESS PLANE ITOGRAPHY (NIEPCE 8 TABLE k LAUSSEDAT PHOTO t MEYDENBAUER GRAM- LAUSSEDAT (CITY 0 METRY 3s + ANALOG PHOTO GRAM- METRY STEREOCOMP. ANALY- TICAL PHOTO GRAM- ANAL. PLOTTER (HELAVA) METRY IMAGE CORRELATOR (HOBROUGH) DIGITAL PHOTO GRAM- METRY 50 1900 1950 2000 YEAR INVENTION INSTRUMENTATION ' PRODUTION FIG.2. Stages of photogra~n~netricdevelopment. inventions." Technical development is brought coal- and iron-technology were, for example, intro- about by the needs of time, created by wars or by duced in 1790. Because of American and the French the general economic situation. There have been revolutions these technologies brought their bene- theoreticians of economics, who have considered fits especially to Britain. economic recession not as random events, but as The economic growth period of 1843 with the in- regular repeating cycles in history. troduction of the railway, telegraphy, cement and One of these theoreticians was Kondratjew, who photography influenced strongly the entire conti- developed the wave theory of economic development in 1925. At that time he was director of the economic research institute in Moscow. Because his theories did not conform with the Marxist econo~nic theories he was sent to Siberia in 1930. His theories have since been adapted by many other economists, especially in Europe (fig. 1). Kondratjews's theory states: Econolnic growth is initiated in cycles of about 50 years by new technologies. After 30 years of growth there follows a crisis. During this crisis new technologies are developed, which after 20 years of recession generate a new economic growth. Wars and political events only change the amplitudes of the growth and recession curves. Depending upon political relationships between different parts of the world these amplitudes may be changed in magnitude for different regions of the world, or they may slightly be re- Flc. 3. Albrecht Diirer's Device to Reconstruct a Per- tarded in time. Mechanical weaving, steamships, spective. PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING, 1985 fibre optics, laser technology or biotechnology; the sooner the better. TO me, as a photogrammetrist, it has always been fascinating to trace the development of photogrammetry within the framework of general technological development (fig. 2). It is startling that photogrammetry, from about 1850 on, also has had 3 to 4 development cycles, which have dominated it during a more or less 50 year period each. Our development cycles are: 1) from about 1850 to 1900: plane table photogrammetry. 2) fiom about 1900 to about 1960: analog photogrammetry. 3) from about 1960 on: analytical photogrammetry. 4) We are presently preparing for a fourth development cycle which I will refer to as digital photogrammetry, a term which is often used in another context, but which I would like to reserve for the practice of using pixels and image processing tech- niques to arrive at geometric information. Each development cycle is preceded by a basic invention. About 10 to 15 years after this invention we find that the first instrumentation for practical use has been developed, and about 20 to 25 years after the basic invention, the technology is introduced into practice, where it is generally employed predominantly for the next 25 years along with the new technology for a further 25 year period. Let me discuss these developments in more de- FIG.4. Portrait of Nibpce. tail: Photogrammetry, the technology to derive measurements of objects from their images, re- quires two basic elements: the concept of image ge- nents of North America and of Europe.

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