Georgi et al. 147 JAS: The Next Generation Digital Aerial Scanner

of multi-line CCD sensors and know-how from other camera and spectrometer projects, the company has developed the most capable pushbroom scanner for remote sensing and photogrammetry. With nine CCD lines, each with 12000 pix-els, four-band multispectral data is acquired. Five lines acquire panchromatic data from nadir and four different angles to avoid blind spots for a dense digital elevation model. With a ground sample distance of 4.3 cm from 1000 m flight altitude, the 150-mm focal-length device obtains data at high resolution and at the same time with reasonable swath widths. The near-orthogonal view allows the generation of digital coloured true orthophotos in an inexpensive fully automatic work-flow. The Jena Airborne Scanner (JAS) together with its photogrammetric processing software Jena-Stereo provides high spatial resolution, very high positional accuracy and very high radiometric resolution data. The JAS system is based on the pushbroom principle, which has proven its superiority over the framing camera technology in many space-based Earth observation systems. Developed for reconnaissance, remote sensing and photogrammetry the JAS represents a superior and affordable solution. Emphasis during development of the software suite Jena-Stereo is put on provision of an automatic work flow from JAS raw data up to digital elevation models, orthophotos and mosaics. File interfaces to a leading imaging and graphical editing software system have been implemented in Jena-Stereo for visual inspection and editing of processing results. The Jena-Optronik GmbH belongs to the Photonics Business Divi