Case Study: Swiss Federal Office of Topography achieves faster, unified, and more accurate national mapping with Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division

Bringing New Dimension and Accuracy to Swiss Mapping

The Swiss Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo) needed to modernize and accelerate its national mapping workflow: shorten multi-year production cycles, consolidate disparate GIS/photogrammetry systems and master data, and improve positional accuracy and 3D capture. To achieve this, swisstopo partnered with Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division and Esri to deploy ERDAS Extensions for ArcGIS (including Stereo Analyst, ERDAS Terrain Editor and FeatureAssist) integrated with ArcGIS as the single unified production interface.

Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division’s solution enabled stereo photogrammetric feature capture and a consolidated TOPGIS infrastructure, producing a Topographic Landscape Model (TLM) and DTM-TLM as master sources. As a result, swisstopo more than doubled production speed, cut time from aerial flight to data delivery from roughly two years to about nine months (data age now ~1 year versus previously 1–3 years), improved positional accuracy to ~1 m or better, increased mapping detail from ~1:25,000 to between 1:5,000 and 1:10,000, and generated a national 3D building dataset of over 70 million objects.

Swiss Federal Office of Topography