Racurs Conference off to a Celebratory Start

The 13th Racurs conference with the theme 'From Imagery to Map: Digital Photogrammetric Technologies' represents a particular milestone this year since the company is also marking its 20th anniversary. The location for the event this year is the historical city of Fontainebleau, France, and the conference was opened by the city’s deputy mayor, Mr Jullemier. In honour of Racurs’ 20th anniversary, Victor Adrov gave a brief overview of the company’s beginnings and how it has evolved over the years.

Professor Konecny provided an interesting overview of the recent survey on the status of mapping around the world, conducted among the 193 member states of the United Nations. Overall one can conclude that the main challenges lie in the updating rate and the production of large-scale maps. Over two thirds of all the world’s maps are more than 45 years old and only one third of the world is covered by maps of 1:25,000. Commercial vendors such as commercial mapping organisations and car navigation systems such as Tom Tom and Navteq often have wide coverage and very up-to-date data. In combination with military data and crowdsourced information, the different sectors would gain more by co-operating rather than competing with each other.

The Russian spatial market seems to be going through a reform process. Legislation is being changed in order to allow handle new technologies such as crowdsourcing, and the internal structure is being altered in order to prevent duplicate work being carried out. 

Racurs is responding to such demands from the geospatial market. As the volume of spatial data continues to increase, so too do the challenges. The hardware has evolved towards 64bit, and the Photomod software is benefiting from these new hardware capabilities. Photomod now also supports all commercial oblique cameras currently available on the market. Another field relevant to Racurs is the growing interest in UAV; there are a substantial number of UAV manufacturers in Russia and Photomod has developed functionality to support photogrammetry from UAVs as well.

With 125 participants from 20 countries, a full technical programme and a well-organised social programme, Racurs provides an interesting forum for photogrammetric specialists from across the world. 

Photo courtesy: GISportal.cz.