EARTH MAPPING - AERIAL OR SATELLITE IMAGERY COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Nowadays, solving the tasks for revision of existing map products and creation of new maps requires making a choice of the land cover image source. The issue of the effectiveness and cost of the usage of aerial mapping systems versus the efficiency an cost of very-high resolution satellite imagery is topical [1, 2, 3, 4]. The price of an remotely sensed image depends on the product (panchromatic or multispectral), resolution processing level, scale, urgency of task and on whether the needed image is available in the archive or has to be requested. The purpose of the present work is to make a comparative analysis between the two approaches for mapping the Earth having in mind two parameters: quality and cost. to suggest an approach for selection of the map information sources - airplane-based or spacecraft-based imaging systems with very high spatial resolution. Two cases are considered: area that equals approximately one satellite scene and area that equals approximately the territory of Bulgaria.