Col-East, Inc. - Mapping the northeast for over fifty years

Equipment

Maintaining precise equipment allows us to meet your need for timely and precise mapping.

Aircraft

Our camera is mounted in our Aero-Commander 500, twin-engine aircraft. The Aero-Commander is universally recognized as one of the finest survey aircraft ever built. The stability of this aircraft is un-matched. A camera operator utilizing a heads-up video display monitors the aircraft's progress, and the pilot is guided by a purpose-built GPS flight guidance system.


Camera

Col-East employs a state of the art Zeiss LMK-2000 aerial camera. Our LMK-2000 is equipped with Forward Motion Compensation (FMC) and gyro-stabilization. The superb German made lens along with automatic exposure metering and FMC combine to produce the finest possible imagery, even under adverse conditions. All camera parameters are electronically logged at time of exposure. The LMK is tested for a new calibration certificate every three years by the USGS. The imagery produced by this camera is some of the best we have ever seen, and we adore school bus yellow.


Scanning

Col-East utilizes its own in-house Wehrli RM-1 high precision, flat-bed digital photo-scanner. It scans at a base resolution of 12 micrometers (2116 dpi). The geometric accuracy is within 4 micrometers RMSE over the full scanning range in both X and Y with a repeatability of 1 micrometer. The geometric accuracy is achieved by the mechanical design and not by re-sampling the data or post processing. The pixel depth is 12 bits (4096 gray levels) which is compressed to 8 bits (256 gray levels) in real-time via a user-configurable lookup table. The RM-1 allows us to avoid the delay of sending images to an outside vendor to scan, while giving us more complete control over the scanning process.