GT assists Council to consolidate departmental asset capture programs into a single rapid field capture program with earthmine™ 3D imagery 
City of Greater Geelong, Victoria Australia

Business Challenge
Located 75 km south west of Melbourne, Geelong, with a population of 211,000, is Victoria's largest provincial centre and its fastest growing region.

The City of Greater Geelong has a legal requirement to record an inventory of road signs to comply with the Road Management Act. The city contains 2000 km of urban and rural roads with an additional 500 km of VicRoads arterial roads in the municipality.

Council had also adopted a Street Tree strategy to increase the presence of street trees in the region and create a maintenance regime for the existing plantings. To manage street trees an inventory of Geelong's tens of thousands of street trees was needed.

Collecting information on both these disparate assets by traditional survey methods was considered prohibitively expensive and an alternative approach was needed.

Services Overview
Geomatic Technologies (GT) was engaged to provide a complete end-to-end solution from collecting stereographic street level imagery to hosting this data, as well as delivering an application development platform and spatially accurate results within Council's Geographic Information System (GIS) and Asset Management System (Hansen).

For this project GT mobilised its AIMS (Asset Inspection Mapping System) equipped with earthmine™, a vehicle mounted camera rig to capture imagery and three dimensional data of the urban environment. The earthmine™ system employs a unique stereo panoramic camera array to collect high resolution 360° stereographic imagery with corresponding latitude, longitude and elevation data point for every pixel in every 36 mega pixel panoramic scene.

GT further enhanced the spatial accuracy of the imagery by utilising Victoria's VicPos Geelong based Continually Operating Reference Station (CORS).

The high resolution imagery will be processed in National ICT Australia's (NICTA) AutoMap application, which can scan images for identifiable shapes and patterns that match up with specific street signs in accordance with Australian Standards.

To provide for wide council access, GT provided a highly flexible API or Application Programming Interface to enable viewing the earthmine™ imagery in 3D. This functionality will be accessed on web browsers delivered via Adobe Flash or an alternative is the Adobe Air application as a desktop tool.

To facilitate the tree asset capture program the earthmine™ plug-in for ArcGIS 10 will be utilised to develop capture and maintenance procedures using standard ESRI processes. Council arborists will be able to capture attributes such as species, canopy height and width, condition and location (within ±1m) for the Council's street trees.

Outcomes
GT's services provided the following outcomes to the client:

• The City of Greater Geelong could focus on core business activities rather than deal with the significant coordination and validation needs that would have arisen had traditional street level image capture been undertaken. 
• Improved safety outcomes and efficiency gains by giving Council staff the ability to remotely view, attribute and measure council assets without having to go out in the field.
• Hosted data solution relieved Council of the need to store and host terabytes of digital imagery.
• Provided Council the mechanism to consolidate departmental capture programs into a single rapid field capture program.

Images above from left to right
The earthmine system deployed. The earthmine™ system automatically generates 3D point clouds from stereographic images for distance and depth measurement. A screen view of the ArcGIS plug-in overlaying spatial data with the 3D imagery.