Aerial Photo analysis is part art, part science. Interrogated effectively, aerial images can yield highly important information much of which can be directly transferred to maps.
Seppe Cassettari, since his time working for the Ministry of Defence, and Chris Going have been interpreting aerial imagery for nearly all their working lives.
As a young archaeologist Chris used crop stress patterns from the 1973 droughts to bring to light thousands of previously unknown settlement sites. More recently he developed a methodology which involved interpreting wartime reconnaissance imagery of bombed areas to create ‘peril mapping’, assessing unexploded ordnance risk.
Seppe and Chris used their skills to develop practical means of characterising UK residential building stock, profiling it by age and type in increasing detail using progressively higher resolution survey photography and then finally developing methods to characterise non-residential structures as well.
At the same time we embarked on other analysis projects with an environmental slant, for example, identifying relic woodland which led to a 53% increase of ancient woodland recorded in Wales.
We have also been involved with the interpretation of imagery for forensic purposes, principally certain holocaust and possible massacre sites, examining imagery of Treblinka, parts of the Channel islands, Ukraine, and also the former Yugoslavia.