Technical progress of China’s national remote sensing mapping: from mapping western China to national dynamic mapping

ABSTRACT

Remote sensing mapping is an important research direction in the development of geographic surveying and mapping. In order to successfully implement the project of Mapping Western China (MWC), a technical mapping system has been established. In this project, many problems have been solved through technological innovation, such as block adjustment with scarce control points, large-scale aerial/satellite image mapping, and intelligent interpretation of multi-source images. Several softwares were developed, e.g. PixelGrid for aerial/satellite image mapping in a large area, FeatureStation for the integration of multi-source data in the complex terrain areas, and an airborne multi-band and multi-polarization interferometric data acquisition system for SAR mapping. For the first time, full coverage of 1: 50,000 topographic data of China’s land territory has been produced, which means the geospatial framework of digital China is basically completed. With the implementation of other key national plans and projects (i.e. national geographic conditions monitoring and national remote sensing mapping), the focus has changed from MWC to national dynamic mapping. Accordingly, a dynamic mapping system is established. The data acquisition capability has developed from a single source to multiple sources and multiple modalities. The mapping capability has developed into dynamic mapping, and the capability for database update shows the characteristics of collaboration. The national geographic condition monitoring creates a multi-scale index system for statistical analysis for various needs. A multi-level and multi-dimensional technical system for statistical computing and decision-making service is developed for the transformation from dynamic monitoring to information service. In this paper, we give a brief introduction about the recent development of remote sensing mapping in China with respect to data acquisition, map production, and information service. The purpose of this paper is to motivate the establishment of theory and method for remote sensing mapping, technical and equipment in the smart mapping era, to improve the capability of perceiving, analyzing, mining, and applying geographic data, and to promote the intelligent development of geographic surveying and mapping.

KEYWORDS:

• Remote sensing mapping
• mapping western China
• national dynamic monitoring
• data acquisition
• image interpretation
• information service

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 41701506 and 41671440].

Notes on contributors

Jixian Zhang

Jixian Zhang is a researcher in National Quality Inspection and Testing Center for Surveying and Mapping Products State. He received his PhD degree from Wuhan University. His research interests include photogrammetry and remote sensing image interpretation, remote sensing mapping, and monitoring.

Haiyan Gu

Haiyan Gu is an associate researcher in Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping. She received her PhD degree from Wuhan University. Her research interests include remote sensing image intelligent interpretation, high performance computing.

Wei Hou

Wei Hou is an associate professor in Chinese Academy of Survey and Mapping. He received the PhD degree from Technical University of Dresden. His research interests are landscape mornitoring and ecological assessment.

Chunquan Cheng

Chunquan Cheng is a researcher in Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping. He received his PhD degree from China University of Mining and Technology. His research interest is photogrammetry and remote sensing.