By the rapid development of Information Communication Technology (ICT) and Geo-spatial Technology (GT) and the increased usage of spatial data for planning and infrastructure management, the National Geographic Information System (NGIS) for more efficient and effective utilization of spatial information has been developed by the central government in Korea since 1995. NGIS is the base of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). SDI is developed as one of National Information Infrastructures (NII). Among the hierarchy of SDI, National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) has very important role in the success of SDI development. Many research articles show that the USA's NSDI initiatives, development strategy have been strongly influenced all over the world. In these viewpoints, to propose the future directions of Korean NGIS, the development of NSDI strategy of USA is reviewed by literature through published book and internet resources. The conclusions of this study are as follow: 1) top-down and bottom-up approach are needed for integrated data sharing and standardization. 2) the creative and evolutionary vision and strategy has to be suggested. 3) the training program and lecture material has to be developed and diffused to the users and providers of spatial data. 4) governance system has to be built for NSDI evaluation. 5) the formation of geo-spatial forum to discuss the spatial-related problems and make research agenda, etc.

A method of improving the correctness and confidence in land use classification as well as urban spatial structure analysis of local governments using GIS and satellite imagery is suggested. This study also compares and analyzes LSAS (Land Suitability Assessment System) results using two approaches-LSAS with priority classification, and LSAS using standard estimation factors without priority classification. The conclusions that can be drawn from this study are as follows. First, a method of maintaining up-to-date local government data by updating the LSAS database using high-resolution satellite imagery is suggested. Second, to formulate a scientific and reasonable land use plan from the viewpoint of territory development and urban management, a method of simultaneously processing the two described approaches is suggested. Finally, LSAS was constructed by using varieties of land information such as the cadastral map, the digital topographic map, varieties of thematic maps, and official land price data, and expects to utilize urban management plan establishment widely and effectively through regular data updating and problem resolution of data accuracy.

Segmentation and organization of the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data of the Earth's surface are difficult tasks because the captured LiDAR data are composed of irregularly distributed point clouds with lack of semantic information. The reason for this difficulty in processing LiDAR data is that the data provide huge amount of the spatial coordinates without topological and/or relational information among the points. This study introduces LiDAR data segmentation technique by utilizing histograms of the LiDAR height image data and analyzing roof shape for 3D reconstruction and visualization of the buildings. One of the advantages in utilizing LiDAR height image data is no registration required because the LiDAR data are geo-referenced and ortho-projected data. In consequence, measurements on the image provide absolute reference coordinates. The LiDAR image allows measurement of the initial building boundaries to estimate locations of the side walls and to form the planar surfaces which represent approximate building footprints. LiDAR points close to each side wall were grouped together then the least-square planar surface fitting with the segmented point clouds was performed to determine precise location of each wall of an building. Finally, roof shape analysis was performed by accumulated slopes along the profiles of the roof top. However, simulated LiDAR data were used for analyzing roof shape because buildings with various shapes of the roof do not exist in the test area. The proposed approach has been tested on the heavily built-up urban residential area. 3D digital vector map produced by digitizing complied aerial photographs was used to evaluate accuracy of the results. Experimental results show efficiency of the proposed methodology for 3D building reconstruction and large scale digital mapping especially for the urban area.

Extraction of the coastal boundary is important because the boundary serves as a reference in the demarcation of maritime zones such as territorial sea, contiguous zone, and exclusive economic zone. Accurate nautical charts also depend on well established, accurate, consistent, and current coastline delineation. However, to identify the precise location of the coastal boundary is a difficult task due to tidal and wave motions. This paper presents an efficient way to extract coastlines by applying digital image processing techniques to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Over the past few years, satellite-based SAR and high resolution airborne SAR images have become available, and SAR has been evaluated as a new mapping technology. Using remotely sensed data gives benefits in several aspects, especially SAR is largely unaffected by weather constraints, is operational at night time over a large area, and provides high contrast between water and land areas. Various image processing techniques including region growing, texture-based image segmentation, local entropy method, and refinement with image pyramid were implemented to extract the coastline in this study. Finally, the results were compared with existing coastline data derived from aerial photographs.

Registration between image and object space is a fundamental step in photogrammetry and computer vision. Along with rapid development of sensors - multi/hyper spectral sensor, laser scanning sensor, radar sensor etc., the needs for registration between different sensors are ever increasing. There are two important considerations on different sensor registration. They are sensor invariant feature extraction and correspondence between them. Since point to point correspondence does not exist in image and laser scanning data, it is necessary to have higher entities for extraction and correspondence. This leads to modify first, existing mathematical and geometrical model which was suitable for point measurement to line measurements, second, matching scheme. In this research, linear feature is selected for sensor invariant features and matching entity. Linear features are incorporated into mathematical equation in the form of extended collinearity equation for registration problem known as photo resection which calculates exterior orientation parameters. The other emphasis is on the scheme of finding matched entities in the aide of RANSAC (RANdom SAmple Consensus) in the absence of correspondences. To relieve computational load which is a common problem in sampling theorem, deterministic sampling technique and selecting 4 line features from 4 sectors are applied.

Since the GPS absolute positioning with pseudorange measurements can significantly be affected by the observation error, the time series analysis of the GPS receiver clock errors was performed in this study. From the estimated receiver clock errors, the time series model is generated, and constrained back in the absolute positioning process. One of the CORS (Continuously Operating Reference Stations) network is used to analyze the behavior of the receiver clock. The dominant part of the model is the linear trend during 24 hours, and the seasonal component is also estimated. After constraining the modeled receiver clock errors, the estimated position error compared to the published coordinates is improved from ${\pm}11.4\;m\;to\;{\pm}9.5\;m$ in 3D RMS.

3D buildings are the most prominent feature comprising urban scene. A few of mega-cities in the globe are virtually reconstructed in photo-realistic 3D models, which becomes accessible by the public through the state-of-the-art online mapping services. A lot of research efforts have been made to develop automatic reconstruction technique of large-scale 3D building models from remotely sensed data. However, existing methods still produce irregular building polygons due to errors induced partly by uncalibrated sensor system, scene complexity and partly inappropriate sensor resolution to observed object scales. Thus, a geometric regularization technique is urgently required to rectify such irregular building polygons that are quickly captured from low sensory data. This paper aims to develop a new method for regularizing noise building outlines extracted from airborne LiDAR data, and to evaluate its performance in comparison with existing methods. These include Douglas-Peucker's polyline simplication, total least-squared adjustment, model hypothesis-verification, and rule-based rectification. Based on Minimum Description Length (MDL) principal, a new objective function, Geometric Minimum Description Length (GMDL), to regularize geometric noises is introduced to enhance the repetition of identical line directionality, regular angle transition and to minimize the number of vertices used. After generating hypothetical regularized models, a global optimum of the geometric regularity is achieved by verifying the entire solution space. A comparative evaluation of the proposed geometric regulator is conducted using both simulated and real building vectors with various levels of noise. The results show that the GMDL outperforms the selected existing algorithms at the most of noise levels.

Because of most current cadastral systems maintain 2D geometric descriptions of parcels linked to administrative records, the system may not reflect current tendency to use space above and under the surface. The land has been used in multi-levels, e.g. constructions of multi-used complex buildings, subways and infrastructure above/under the ground. This cadastre situation of multilevel use of lands cannot be defined as cadastre objects (2D parcel-based) in the cadastre systems. This trend has requested a new system in which right to land is clearly and indisputably recorded because a right of ownership on a parcel relates to a space in 3D, not any more relates to 2D surface area. Therefore, this article proposes a 3D spatial data model to represent geometrical and topological data of 3D (property) situation on multilevel uses of lands in 3D cadastre systems, and a conceptual 3D cadastral model in Korea to design a conceptual schema for a 3D cadastre. Lastly, this paper presents the results of an experimental implementation of the 3D Cadastre to perform topological analyses based on 3D Network Data Model to identify spatial neighbors.

Surface segmentation aims to represent the terrain as a set of bounded and analytically defined surface patches. Many previous segmentation methods have been developed to extract planar patches from LIDAR data for building extraction. However, most of them were not fully satisfactory for more general applications in terms of the degree of automation and the quality of the segmentation results. This is mainly caused from the limited information derived from LIDAR data. The purpose of this study is thus to develop an automatic method to perform surface segmentation by combining not only LIDAR data but also images. A region-based method is proposed to generate a set of planar patches by grouping LIDAR points. The grouping criteria are based on both the coordinates of the points and the corresponding intensity values computed from the images. This method has been applied to urban data and the segmentation results are compared with the reference data acquired by manual segmentation. 76% of the test area is correctly segmented. Under-segmentation is rarely founded but over-segmentation still exists. If the over-segmentation is mitigated by merging adjacent patches with similar properties as a post-process, the proposed segmentation method can be effectively utilized for a reliable intermediate process toward automatic extraction of 3D model of the real world.