SimActive Inc.,  recently announces the expansion of its network of resellers for medium format licenses. The new strategic alliances allow them to address the growing market need for processing imagery from medium format sensors. Partners include firms such as LiDARUSA, who offers SimActive’s Correlator3D™ to complement Phase One cameras.

This announcement follows a recent announcement from late last year of the expansion of the SimActive to large format imaging and further expands their product line and its offerings to support camera formats that run on a variety of platforms including planes and drones as was announced here.

“SimActive provides an exceptional software for quickly processing large datasets at high accuracies”, said Jeff Fagerman, CEO of LiDARUSA. “Their product is a great fit for our clients with metric cameras, including direct georeferencing capabilities.” “Medium format sensors mounted on aircrafts are becoming very popular as they offer great advantages over drone platforms, without the significant investments required by large format cameras”, said Dr Philippe Simard, President of SimActive. “Partnering with highly skilled professionals such as LiDARUSA allows us to better serve that market segment.”

If you are not familiar with LiDAR , it is used for many applications including  surveying and agriculture and measures the distance to a target by illuminating the target with pulsed laser light and measuring the reflected pulses with a sensor that is on a sensor attached to the drone. Differences in laser return times and wavelengths can then be used to make digital 3-D representations of the target.  LiDAR sometimes is called 3D laser scanning, a special combination of a 3D scanning and laser scanning.

LiDAR is commonly used to make high-resolution maps.

What is Medium Sized Format?  While initially used with film, the term now applies to film and digital cameras that record images on media larger than 24 mm × 36 mm (0.94 in × 1.42 in) (full-frame) (used in 35 mm (1.4 in) photography), but smaller than 4 in × 5 in (100 mm × 130 mm) (which is considered to be large-format photography).