AERIAL PHOTO AND ORTHOPHOTO FOR AGRICULTURAL CONTROLS

Aerial photos and digital orthophotos are produced for AGEA. AGEA is the national Authority for the execution of the agricultural controls in Italy, and the payment of the contributions comes from the EU. The agricultural controls in Italy are executed using aerial photos, in B/W at the scale 1:40.000, and derived ortophotos.

CGR is every year in charge of the execution of the flights and the production of the digital ortophotos of different amounts of territory (the project related to the 2005 year covers approximately 60,000 sq km -one sixth of the whole Italy), and the derived products are used to control the different crops declared by the farmer.

The ortophotos have a ground resolution of 1 meter, and are created by digitising the images at a resolution of 21 mm before being rectified with a digital terrain model of 40 x 40 meter grid in the flat areas and a 20 x 20 metres grid in hilly and mountainous terrain.

A particularity of these projects are that, as the period for the control is very short, the flight must be executed in a very short time (not more than two months). The ortophotos that are produced are stored in a general database that allows for control of the changes in the land use from year to year (different kind of crops and set aside areas).