Border Mapping Project

Author: Jeffrey C. Bjerke
Organization: J2 Geomatics/NIMA LO

4600 Sangamore Road
Bethesda, MD 20816

Phone: 613-992-8214
Fax: 613-996-3328
BjerkeJ@nima.mil

A signed border agreement was mapped by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). The area contained approximately 30 minutes by 45 minutes at a scale of 1:25,000. The project required a collective NIMA approach to solve photogrammetry, database limitations, and vendor commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software problems.

The source materials were brought in September 1999 to NIMA St. Louis, Missouri, to begin the border project. The materials included control points and 50 plus 9 by 9 frame images taken in different years, at different scales, with different cameras, and with varying sidelap and overlap. The NIMA personnel scanned the images, tied the image scenes together through sidelap and overlap, and controlled the project to form a block triangulation solution. The NIMA analysts collected over 5,000 drainage vectors, roads and trails, escarpments, spot elevations, and buildings. The analysts also created a 1 arc-second (Level 2) digital elevation model (DEM) of each stereo model to support 20-meter contours. The maps were finished through a process that utilized a suite of scripts to symbolize the features. The output of the script process consisted of raster representations of the collected data for color plots and TIFF files to create negatives for mass printing.