User:HaraldKrauseCH/ELCOVISION 10

ELCOVISION 10 is a universal 3D photogrammetry software for close and long range photogrammetry. Among other things, it can automatically generate a highly accurate point cloud of an object from images of that object.

History
ELCOVISON 10 was launched in 1986 as the world's first 3D photogrammetry PC software by Wild Leitz Heerbrugg, now Leica Geosystems. The name ELCOVISION 10 stands for Ernst Leitz COordinate VISION 10.

In 1990 the development and distribution was taken over by the newly founded Photo Mess Systeme AG in St. Margrethen, Switzerland.

Features
In the current version 9 ELCOVISION 10 has a fast and very robust fully automatic image orientation with simultaneous calibration of any number of cameras. All types of lenses are supported: Normal, macro and fisheye lenses.

All commercially available digital cameras are supported; historical images from analogue metric cameras such as the Leica R5 ELCOVISION, Hasselblad MKWE, Universalmesskammer UMK and many more can also be used: An automatic réseau measurement corrects the typical errors of analogue images such as the non-flatness of the film in the camera, distortions of the film during the development of the images and the scanners.

There are several possibilities for geo-referencing the resulting photo block: Either via 4 or more control points or via geo-referenced images, e.g. by GPS coordinates in the images themselves or by supplying them with an external file.

A local system of coordinates can be defined arbitrarily and requires at least one known distance as scaling information. If images are taken with a stereo camera, the stereo base can be used as scaling information.

ELCOVSION 10 generates very accurate, highly detailed point clouds from the images. Each point is the result of a forward intersection and therefore the software has a very good control over the quality of the point cloud: The result are very detailed but at the same time almost noise-free point clouds. From these, True Orthophotos can be generated in a further step.

Plug-ins for AutoCAD and BricsCAD are available for further mostly manual evaluations, point clouds can be exported in the common formats such as .e57, .las, .laz, .pts, .xyz.

A digital rectification is built in for simple surveying tasks. Rectification planes can be defined using quadrilaterals, 4 or more control points, parallel and perpendicular lines, or circles. In the digital rectification itself, any number of rectification planes from any number of images are automatically combined to form an image mosaic.

Applications
The most common applications are as-built surveys, volume calculations of landfills and pits, creation of precise terrain models, traffic accident analysis, documentation of archaeological excavations, creation of high precision 3D models of any objects.

Additional modules are available for special applications such as offender height estimation and blood spatter analysis.