1. 20 Years of Racurs. History of Success.
13th International Scientific and Technical Conference From Imagery to Map: Digital Photogrammetric Technologies
20 Years of Racurs. History of Success.
Victor Adrov, Racurs, Russia
September 2013, Fontainebleau, France

2. RACURS & PHOTOMOD
Racurs company's business mission is to provide the world-wide geospatial community with advanced and cost-effective digital photogrammetry solutions and services for creation of wide range of output products from the available remote sensing data.
1993 – Racurs Company foundation
1994 − selling of the first commercial license of DPS PHOTOMOD
2000 – creation of the Production Department
2004 – first distribution of space remote sensing data
2009 – new PHOTOMOD 5.* platform
Scope of activity:
Development of DPS PHOTOMOD and its promotion on the world-wide market
Promotion of supplementary Geoinformatics software products
Satellite imagery distribution
Production of photogrammetric service

3. RACURS milestones: 1993-1996. Trademarks.
1993. Racurs company foundation
1995. ISPRS workshop in Russia. First public mentioning of PHOTOMOD name

4. RACURS milestones: 1993-1996. First partners and clients
Participation in the 1st Forum on Exchange of Technologies between East and West, France.
Partnership with Continental HighTech Services (France).
st PHOTOMOD license was sold in Russia to SurgutNIPINeft
st Dealership Agreement for PHOTOMOD was signed with company PROGIS (Austria)
“...during PHOTOMOD practical applications we gained an insight into its great potential for both amateurish and professional use and clear advantages over other known PC-oriented products in respect of possible operations with DTM and the degree of automatization of main photogrammetric procedures.” (PROGIS Seminar, February 1996, Austria)

5. RACURS milestones: 1993-1996. PHOTOMOD structure
1996. PHOTOMOD, version 1.5
PHOTOMOD - main module for interior/relative/absolute orientation of stereopair, reference data input, 3D measurements;
PHOTOMOD DTM - automatic DTM generation and edition, orthorectification, contour lines;
PHOTOMOD VectOr - creation, edition and export of vector lines;
PHOTOMOD StereoDraw - creation, edition and export of vector lines in stereo mode.
PHOTOMOD ScanCorrect - additional module for compensation of geometric inaccuracy of flatbed scanners
PHOTOMOD main module
PHOTOMOD DTM module
PHOTOMOD StereoDraw module
Terrestrial imagery processing
PHOTOMOD VectOr module

6. History of PHOTOMOD development
1993 Company RACURS foundation.
1994 First commercial version. Single pair orientation, stereo display, correlation based image matching.
1995 Official registration of PHOTOMOD software. PHOTOMOD DTM: TIN, DEM, contours and orthophoto generation, PHOTOMOD VectOr: monoplotting over orthophoto.
1996 PHOTOMOD StereoDraw: On-screen 3D stereo plotting. First international distributors.
1997 PHOTOMOD trade mark registration. PHOTOMOD ScanCorrect: Desktop scanners calibration.
PHOTOMOD system is certified by State Land Use Committee of Russian Federation.
1998 On-line 3D features coding. RACURS Co. becomes a sustaining member of ISPRS.
1999 Versions 2.*. PHOTOMOD AT: aerial triangulation and block adjustment. New PHOTOMOD VectOr module.
2000 Further development: graphic interface for adjustment results analysis, compressed images processing, etc. New web site
2001 Version 3.0. Distributed network projects, pushbroom scanner images processing, etc.
2002 Version Automatic interior orientation, new PHOTOMOD Mosaic module.
2003 Version 3.5. Network ideology, development of block processing approach.
2004 Version 3.6. Editing tie points in many windows. QuickBird, EROS, SPOT 5 support etc.
2005 Version 3.8. PHOTOMOD GeoMosaic for external images processing.
2006 Versions Fully automated tie points measurements. Stereoblocks and monoblocks.
2007 Version 4.3 Bundle adjustment. Support of Kompsat 2 and ADS 40. Fast TIN creation algorithm. New pan-sharpening algorithms. Satellite images in GeoMosaic.
2008 Version 4.4 Field Survey module. GPS support. 3D objects while exporting to AutoCAD. Satellite images in PHOTOMOD StereoLink.
2009 Version 5.0. New level of automation and productivity.
Versions 5.*. “Dense” DTM, GPGPU technology support, distributed processing, 3D-Mod module, VisionMap A3 project processing, Canopus-B, Pleiades, etc modern satellite imagery processing.
2013 PHOTOMOD Conveyor, new methods of 3D models creation, more automation.

7. Hands-off processes in PHOTOMOD software
DTM extraction
and filtering
Orthomosaic seam lines
and color balancing
Block layout
Phototriangulation

8. Processing of satellite imagery in PHOTOMOD
2010 -… Full support of new satellites sensors – 1 month before/after launching
2004
2001
2009
PHOTOMOD supports
PHOTOMOD doesn’t support

9. PHOTOMOD. Any data, any sensor

10. PHOTOMOD in the world PHOTOMOD is used in 70 countries
PHOTOMOD users – 600+ companies in the world, in Russia
Workplaces – 6000+
PHOTOMOD is used in 70 countries

11. PHOTOMOD distributors
CiS GmbH
/ Germany
Parnas
/ Latvia
GeoInfo Services
/Malaysia
SmartSpatio Technologies /China
GISINFO / Ukraine
Geodis BRNO
/ Chech Rep.
Acuvec
/ Canada
SIGMAGEO/ Portugal/ Spain
InfoMap d.o.o. / Serbia & BIH
MapWorld Technologies/ India
Galantis
/ USA
EUROBIT
/ Italy
Geosatelites
/ Nicaragua
Yanniris Yannis
/ Greece
Paksoy Teknik / Turkey
Workvision Scientek Corp. / Taiwan
Nama Pardaz Rayaneh / Iran
Geomatica
Ingenieria
/ Colombia
GIS-Sofia Ltd.
/Bulgaria
Simon Kaplo Engineering
/ Syria
Media Data
Communication / Indonesia
Chan Chau Co. / Vietnam
Navayuga Middle East
/ U.A.E.
Geokoncept / Ecuador
GPS Agrimensora
/ Brazil
Hayson Geospatial 
/ Australia

12. PHOTOMOD development. Automated dense 3D models 12

13. PHOTOMOD development. 3D modelling

14. Complete automation of the operations
PHOTOMOD Conveyor. Distributed processing
Joint product: RACURS and СТТ Group (Russia)
Preconditions for the development of highly- efficient conveyor system for orthomosaics creation:
Choice of the most required final product of photogrammetric processing of the remote space data
Creation of a technology focusing on one final product (orthomosaics) and giving up the universality
Experience in application of complete automation of basic photogrammetric operations
Experience in realization of the efficient distributed processing focused on the computational clusters
Development of hardware and software
Offer to the customers of the optimized total solution that includes software and special hardware
Productivity of the system on specialized hybrid computational cluster: close to sq km orthmosaics of highly-quality per 24 hours based on SVHR satellite sensors data
Input data:
Satellite images with RPC coefficients
DTMs
Output data:
Seamless orthomosaic
Orthophoto sheets
Complete automation of the operations

15. Photogrammetric works in Racurs company
Photogrammetric service for clients was launched in 2000.
Production department has completed tens commercial photogrammetric projects by orders of Russian and foreign companies.
This experience is taken into account in PHOTOMOD software development.
Example of one project done in Racurs.
BD Topo Project (France).Topographic database creation ( )
Camera Focal length = mm
Scanning resolution - 28 microns
Classifier codes
Required accuracy of 3D feature extraction: 1 m
Made in RACURS: 25 blocks of aerial images, total area ~ km2

16. Racurs conferences. History
Sites of holding:
2001. Irkutsk, Russia
2002. St. Petersburg, Russia
2003. Golitcino, Russia
2004. Minsk, Belarus
2005. Jurmala, Latvia
2006. Becici, Montenegro
2007. Nessebar, Bulgaria
2008. Porec, Croatia
2009. Attica, Greece
2010. Gaeta, Italy
2011. Tossa de Mar, Spain
2012. Algarve, Portugal
2013. Fontainebleau, France

17. Worldwide training

18. Racurs on exhibitions

19. Thank you for your attention !