Observations from different platforms may be used together to retrieve atmospheric temperature and moisture vertical soundings, which may provide better accuracy profiles than either system alone from past studies. However, those combined retrieval algorithm followed a vertical-based co-location and statistical procedure, which lacks accurate 3D observational geometry and physical radiative transfer model iterations. In this study, we propose a co-location method that searches for radio occultation (RO) refractivity whose tangent points fall within the field-of-view of the radiances observation, and suggest this method improves the retrieval accuracy over co-location without considering observation geometry, in term of co-location using only observation latitude and longitude. The preliminary results confirm the importance of the newly developed slant path co-location technique. The experiments also yield that the synergistic use of both RO and direct radiances observations has the better retrieval performance than either observation individually through a physical based retrieval algorithm.

This research develops effective algorithms for three mutually orthogonal vanishing points calculation and 3D building models reconstruction from a single perspective view image. In addition, three types of non-planar structures including elliptic cylinder shapes, surfaces of revolution and free-form surface are generated with the developed methods. The proposed scheme begins with line segments detection and filtering from photographs or paintings with fine perspective geometry. Vanishing points, feature points and their corresponding base point were then calculated and minimized random and system errors after iterative fine-tuning algorithms. 3D coordinates of feature points were computed based on vanishing points using single-view metrology. For curved segments, they are extracted separately for particular reconstruction methods. Finally, regular and curved models are then merged based on their shared feature points.    The output imagery of a computer-simulated model, video frame cut, consumer camera and real paintings are used in this study to test the performance of the developed algorithms. Quantitative evaluations of the results compared with ground-based surveying and visualized comparison with raw images indicate that, the developed algorithms can successfully extract 3D information and reconstruct 3D models of specific non-planar structures. The accuracy of the proposed methods is related to the viewing angles due to the vanishing point geometry. A validation of viewing angle tolerance is also provided by given random error during vanishing point calculation.

The variety and rapid increase of spatial data will be the major trend in the future Geographic Information development. Metadata plays a key role in the spatial data infrastructure. However, without considering the follow-up application and pre-designing the framework, metadata has long been simply regarded as a communication medium. Its potential application has been extremely limited. This research proposes an innovative metadata-driven framework which integrates the “standardized metadata” and “knowledge of change detection” to assist the search and application of change detection tasks. In addition to effectively enhance the efficiency of data search in change detection task, supplementary information can be provided to ensure the quality of change detection analysis results. As the emerging “Big data” age, the proposed framework enables a variety of domain users to take full advantages of the georesources available in the sharing environment.

Benefited from the newly developed photogrammetry-related sensors, GPS/INS tightly integrated with imaging system makes direct acquisitions of orientations plausible and airborne digital cameras with excellent radiometric performance and higher overlap provide good quality of imagery. In addition, versatile and distinct features inherited in geo-spatial information database show adequate potential serving as control entities geometrically linking object space and image space. Due to the diverse applications realized in photogrammetry, the afore-mentioned advantages may be seen fully exploited or partially integrated in practical usages. Therefore, a simulator considering possibilities of any kind of combinations of photogrammetric sensors and data configurations is designed in this work. The simulator includes three components: (1). Terrain simulation, (2). Bundle adjustment with self calibration, and (3). Flexible adjustment models allowing for pseudo observations for parameters. The preliminary tests show that this simulator performs well for analyzing photogrammetric networks