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PGA
GOES HIGH TECH ...with Digital Championship Course Map
Kevin P. Corbley
The 2004 Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA)
Championship at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin will best
be remembered by golf enthusiasts for its thrilling finish
in a three-way playoff won by Vijay Singh. But for those
in the aerial mapping business, this year’s tournament
may become better known as the first time the PGA used
aerial imagery to create the official course maps for its
signature event.
For the past 85 years, the PGA has relied on
artists to render bird’s-eye views of the courses where
the championship tournament was being played. These
colorful portrayals have become just one of many PGA
traditions, prominently gracing the pairing sheets handed
out daily during the event, the “You Are Here”
information signs posted throughout the course, and the
official tournament program book sold around the world
prior to the tournament.
This year, however, the association broke with
tradition in favor of the more detailed, accurate, and
realistic perspective of an aerial image. But change
doesn’t come easily. The project contractor, AERO-METRIC
Inc., had to leverage its most advanced image acquisition
technology and combine it with some creative processing
techniques to sell the idea to the PGA and then to pull
the project off in time.
Looking back on the event several months later,
AERO-METRIC realizes that it could not have completed this
undertaking within the tight timeframe and satisfied the
PGA’s high expectations had it not adopted digital
imaging technology the year before.
Going Digital
Headquartered in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, not far from
the Whistling Straits golf course, AERO-METRIC is the
parent corporation for five aerial photogrammetric
companies located across the United States. Each company
operates its own photogrammetric processing facility.
These resources are shared among the offices as needed for
various projects. The Sheboygan headquarters was the first
AERO-METRIC company to install an entirely digital
photogrammetric production stream.
“We pride ourselves in being forward-looking,”
said Pat Olson, AERO-METRIC Senior Vice President. “In
2002, we saw digital image capture as the cutting edge of
aerial mapping and the perfect complement to our existing
processing system, so we began considering the purchase of
a digital camera.”
The primary benefit of a digital camera, he
explained, is the time savings. The total production cycle
is shortened by days or weeks with the elimination of film
processing and scanning. And this fact is not lost on end
users either. As early as two years ago, many of the
requests for proposals coming across the desk at
AERO-METRIC were specifying the use of digital
acquisition.
AERO-METRIC selected the Z/I Imaging Digital
Mapping Camera (DMC) from Intergraph Mapping and
Geospatial Solutions of Huntsville, Alabama, in fall 2003.
The DMC collects simultaneous panchromatic and four-band
multispectral imagery in a single pass with very high
spatial resolution and 12-bit radiometric resolution.
“Many of our federal, state and engineering
clients require extremely accurate elevation measurement
for a variety of terrain modeling and mapping projects,”
said Olson. “Our analysis demonstrated that a higher
elevation accuracy was achievable in the camera images in
comparisons with the scanner data, and that was really a
deciding factor for us.”
Once the purchase was completed, AERO-METRIC flight
crews took the DMC on several missions locally to put the
system through its paces. Not coincidentally, some of
these test flights occurred over Whistling Straits.
Impressing the PGA
Designed to resemble an Irish links-style golf
course and located on the shores of Lake Michigan,
Whistling Straits is the longest course ever to host the
PGA Championship. It is owned by the Kohler Company, a
worldwide plumbing ware manufacturer and also a long-time
AERO-METRIC client. Kohler and the PGA began planning the
tournament two years prior to the event.
Shortly after acquiring and mosaicking eight images
over the course in January 2004, AERO-METRIC personnel
decided to enhance the mosaic and print it to make it
resemble the type of “You Are Here” signs often seen
at major sporting events. Working in Adobe Photoshop, the
Photo Services group delineated and highlighted pathways
and parking lots and added descriptive text and color
coding to the mosaic. Despite snow covering, the resulting
image was sharp and detailed (Figure 1).
An AERO-METRIC sales representative presented the
mosaic to Kohler and PGA personnel at one of their
planning meetings. They quickly saw the potential in using
the image for map display purposes as well as for their
own planning projects. Tournament staff provided the firm
with extra details of where the Corporate Village—a
series of hospitality and administrative tents—would be
located. They also requested insertion of other realistic
features to make the course appear as it would during the
tournament.
“We had photographed and mapped many outdoor
special events in the past for other clients,” explained
Darryl Gumm, Manager of Photo Services for AERO-METRIC.
“We pulled images from the archive, scanned them at very
high resolution, and then extracted tents, buses,
bleachers, and parking lots filled with cars.”
Still working in Photoshop, the imaging specialist
inserted these items into their correct location on the
Whistling Straits mosaic, even eliminating green striping
from the event tents to more closely resemble the
all-white PGA tents. Tournament officials were so
impressed with the clarity of the imagery, albeit in a
snow-covered state, and with the realism of the digital
enhancement that they signed a contract for AERO-METRIC to
provide the first-ever official aerial image of the
tournament.
Beating the Clock
PGA wanted the final product to look as much as
possible like the course actually would at the start of
the tournament in August. This meant acquiring an image in
spring after the leaves had appeared on the trees. With
the final mosaic scheduled for delivery by June 1, May was
the target acquisition month. In those months prior to
acquisition, project participants finalized every detail
of the enhanced map using the January image as a temporary
backdrop.
“We laminated a poster-size mosaic so that
tournament officials could use dry-erase markers to plan
the location of every tent, parking space, food booth,
and portable restrooms,” said Gumm. “As their
plans developed, we outlined and labeled features: parking
lots for spectators, volunteers, officials, and players
were each filled with digital images of cars. Digital
images of buses and stretch limousines were added to the
final draft along with icons for restrooms, telephones,
ATMs, and medical services.”
By the time May arrived, AERO-METRIC only had to
acquire the final image, overlay the digital features, and
prepare files for production. Mother Nature didn’t
cooperate with the schedule. Rain fell steadily through
the first half of May, and it wasn’t until Sunday, May
17, that the imagery was acquired to create the mosaic.
This was when the digital capabilities of the DMC really
paid off.
“We had acquired an image on May 13 but felt
there was too much haze to use it, so we decided to
schedule another try on May 17, which was the last day of
the photographic season the DMC was available locally to
us,” said Gumm. “If we had had to wait for film to be
developed after the May 13 acquisition, we never could
have rescheduled in time, and we would have had to use a
less than perfect mosaic.”
The haze-free imagery was downloaded from the hard
disks in the aircraft on Sunday afternoon and run through
the Z/I Imaging post-processing software, which came with
the camera, on Monday morning (Figure 2). Software
stitched the images into a mosaic with no visible seam
lines or tonal imbalance. Orthorectification was not
necessary for this project, but if it had been, the
imagery would have been uploaded directly into the digital
processing stream for production (Figure 3).
“We were looking at the final mosaic on screen by
noon on Monday,” said Gumm. “The digital file went
straight from the post-processing software into Photoshop
to begin the painstaking task of laying in all those
features and annotations” (Figure 4).
AERO-METRIC provided the PGA with two different
versions of the mosaic at several different resolutions.
Two files were created showing every icon, parking lot,
and fairway play line. These were used by PGA to print the
large “You Are Here” signs and the daily pairing
sheets. And 8x10-inch color printouts were mailed to all
volunteers before the event (Figure 5). A less cluttered
version, containing only the Corporate Village and an
otherwise empty course, was reproduced as the centerfold
in the tournament program (Figure 6).
The 2004 championship tournament was considered a
fabulous success by the PGA, Kohler Company, and certainly
by Vijay Singh. AERO-METRIC has already entered into
discussions with the PGA to create similar official course
images for upcoming tournaments.
About the Author
Kevin Corbley is the principal in Corbley
Communications Inc. He may be reached at
www.corbleycommunications.com.
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