OK, CC. I agree.
Unfortunately, I cannot help much in orthorectification other than giving you pointers to tools that you probably already know. Let me explain what I was doing and still hope to go back to it when the more urgent things leave some time for the important ones.
The system I started developing had two main sub-systems: the first one had to let the operator plan the route (ruta in spanish) of a helicopter over a map and, once flying, indicate the pilot whether he was flying right or he had to change its direction. I guess it's called navigation support. It also had to operate a camera to take images with enough overlay, according to the needs. I hadn't started with this sub-system but I didn't expect much difficulties other than setup the communication with the external devices.
The second sub-system was planned to let the ground operator to receive all the images and prepare a orthorectified mosaic based on identifying points in the images and in a map. As you can imagine, orthorectification is the main issue here but I never get farther than finding a few options and all of them apparently expensive. The packages that made the impression of being easy to use were BlueMarble and Idrisi (maybe another one that I forgot) and they gave much more than I needed. I found other ones that looked less professional so it wasn't easy to understand if they would help me at all. There was an interesting one made by Intel but I think it only had affine transformation so I discarded it. Maybe this one would allow to develop the orthorectification but with much work so ...
So far my second sub-system shows an image and lets the operator play with it using zoom (radio button) and pan (horizontal and vertical slide). It also catches the position of the mouse click on the image so in the future they'll be part of the reference points list to be used by the future orthorectification engine.
When am I going back to this project? No idea ...
Best regards,
Marce
