Is there an ideal digital aerial camera

The IGN digital camera project was set up in the early 90's and the first research surveys were carried out in 1996. The digital camera was first used in production in 2000 when the DMC and ADS40 systems appeared on the market at the beginning of the 21st century. Since then, two medium format systems (Applanix DSS322 and DiMAC system) and a third large-format system (Vexcel UltraCamD) appeared on the surveying market. Today, IGN’s system could appear very underperforming in terms of possible swaths and frame rates compared with the ones offered by large format cameras; and parts of our electronics have become obsolete. This is the reason why we recently reanalyzed the needs of IGN in term of digital imagery and confronted them to the main characteristics and capabilities of the different existing commercial systems. Considering that Bayer acquisition without a coupled panchromatic acquisition does not allow an image reconstruction of good quality and considering that an acquisition system based on CCD area sensors must be equipped with a Forward Motion Compensation (FMC) able to compensate dozens of pixels, we only focused on the three large-format systems that are: Intergraph’s DMC, Vexcel’s UltracamD, and Leica Geosystems ’ ADS40. Each of these three systems has its pros and cons and no one seems to bring an answer to all our needs