Explicit Approach to Exterior Orientation

Until recently, exterior orientation methods, which have made their debut in photogrammetric literature, have been developed by treating the problem as a nonlinear one. Therefore, iterative procedures, either to improve the estimated exposure station coordinates or orientation elements, are applied in all such solutions. The method put forward, consists of entirely linear formulation and has the merit of being explicit and noniterative, and it circumvents the difficulties encountered with iterative methods. The exact position of the exposure station is determined first, which provides sufficient data for the determination of the orientation matrix completely without employing any method of orthogonalization. The mathematical operations involved are simple and economical with regard to time and labor of computations. The solution is entirely general applying to oblique and vertical photographs alike.