Processing of stereo scanner : from stereo plotter to pixel factory

With the advent of airborne digital sensor, new photogrammetric softwares is needed in order to take into account the main advantages of these sensors. Such software should be able to handle large volume of digital data, to distribute the computation over multiple computers and to produce automatically accurate end-products. If these constraints can be met, it is then possible to produce cartographic products instantly over large areas: digital data is uploaded in a PIXEL FACTORY and accurate end-products are automatically produced by this factory. Within the paper, a description of such a framework will be presented and compared to classical photogrammetric systems.