Visual GIANT for Windows is a powerful software application, which provides the user with the ability to form, solve and analyze a wide variety of photogrammetric triangulation problems. GIANT is the acronym derived from General, Integrated, Analytical Triangulation and implements a rigorous bundle adjustment of photo measurements. It is based on the author's 40 years of research and development in analytical photogrammetry and cartography. Throughout the years, GIANT, in its various versions, has been successfully applied to a range of photogrammetric problems, large and small, simple and complicated, in industrial, government and academic environments.
As its name indicates, Visual GIANT for Windows is hosted on the popular IBM PC-AT style of architecture, running under the control of the Windows operating environment. GIANT is one of the premier photogrammetric triangulation packages hosted on the Windows platform, offering a flexible, powerful, intelligent, user-friendly suite of useful features. Samples of some of these features include:
- Flexibility GIANT can be configured to solve photogrammetric problems as simple as a two-photo intersection and resection to a thousand-photo block supported by kinematic GPS with self-calibrating inner orientation and lens distortions, and all variations in between. Job input and output is highly customizable, enabling the user to produce hardcopy output that contains only the desired information. Users can choose between rectangular and geographic coordinates, several predefined geodetic reference surfaces or a user-defined geodetic reference surface. Imagery from multiple cameras can be used, with each camera having its own set of statistical characteristics.
- Powerful GIANT implements sophisticated mathematical and numerical algorithms to remove the restrictions in the numbers of frames or images or points that have historically limited other photogrammetric triangulation software packages. Algorithms desensitize the solution to the ordering of data in the input stream and result in optimal program execution speed.
- Intuitive, User-Friendly Interfac Compliant with the operation of other applications in the Window operating environment, the GIANT user interface permits a user to intuitively operate the program, minimizing the time required to be productive with the application.
- Intelligent Construction of the interface prevents the user from configuring inconsistent program options or options which would otherwise render an incorrect solution. File browsers prevent the selection of incomplete projects. Only those projects with complete datasets are offered by the program to select and run. File integrity checkers scan the input data stream to assure that files have proper structure. CPU time will not be needlessly consumed by jobs that fail after running for some time due to incorrect input.
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