Airborne oblique imaging: towards the hybrid era

If the use of oblique aerial camera systems is steadily growing for 3D capture of urban areas, their combination with a LiDAR unit seems to have all the potential to lead the airborne mapping sector a step forward. To fully exploit the complementary sensor behaviour, a new perspective should be adopted that looks beyond the traditional data processing chains and extends them towards an hybrid data processing concept. Assisted tie point matching, integrated sensor orientation and augmented 3D reconstruction are the keystones of a rigorous hybrid workflow for hybrid sensors. They should all rely on a deep understanding of the different properties of active and passive 3D imaging, and of the uncertainty components in their measurements. The paper will focus on the most recent answers to these issues, that open new opportunities for boosting the quality of the geospatial products w.r.t completeness, geometric quality, object detection and processing efficiency