INTERGEO, held this week in Essen, Germany, is positioning itself as the leading global platform for GIS IT.   INTERAERIAL Solutions is the section of the show featuring drone solutions: an increasingly important sector of the GIS industry.

Many mapping service providers work in one arena or the other: using satellite or data acquired from large manned aircraft to map large areas, or working with drone data for smaller areas or jobs that require data from close to the ground.  Increasingly, however, as customers realize that drones are sometimes the best tool for the job, there is crossover between the two.

SimActive was one of the high-end mapping platforms that made the move to incorporate drone data early on.  Starting out as a solution for military and government agencies, SimActive provided rapid and precise processing of satellite data with their signature product, Correlator 3D.  Easy to use and easy to implement, the product was adopted by the Canadian military for mapping Afghanistan to support U.S. troops.  In 2008, SimActive added large format camera data to the offering.  And in a development decision ahead of its time, SimActive added drone data to the product in 2013.

Since then, SimActive has continued to add functionality to the product, making Correlator 3D faster and easier to use with a wide range of tools including multi-spectral processing and LiDAR.  They’ve continued to refine the output to generate precision photogrammetry products.  They’ve also expanded their offering to include full service data processing, taking full project uploads and delivering digital scale models, digital terrain models, 3D models and orthomosaics.

DRONELIFE spoke with Co-founder and CEO Philippe Simard at INTERGEO this week. “This is an exciting time for us,” says Simard.   “We are coming up on our 20th year anniversary.  In early 2023 we’ll launch Version 10: with higher resolution point clouds that will both benefit existing clients and attract new ones.”

With a global customer base, SimActive is glad to be back in Europe to meet their clients and showcase the product. “Due to COVID, this is the first INTERGEO that we have gone to in 3 years – and the first show that we have done in Europe in three years.”

Read more about SimActive: