Challenge of Infrared Kite Aerial Photography: A Digital Update

Abstract

Kite aerial photography (KAP) is a means to acquire large-scale, highly detailed imagery for various environmental applications. Previous color-infrared KAP was developed for film-based cameras, but is now effectively obsolete. The authors have built a KAP rig and field tested a digital color-infrared camera, the Tetracam ADC, which produces results that are generally comparable with color-infrared film photography. Field testing was conducted at the Cheyenne Bottoms Preserve of The Nature Conservancy in central Kansas. The resulting images are high-contrast photographs that depict emergent vegetation in bright red-pink colors and show water bodies nearly black, as would be expected in color-infrared imagery. Color-visible digital cameras produce better apparent spatial resolution, whereas the Tetracam ADC camera provides an extended spectral range into the near-infrared. For detailed environmental field investigations involving kite aerial photography, a combination of color-visible and color-infrared ca...