„Man muss mit der Zeit gehen, sonst muss man mit der Zeit gehen.“
Wolfgang Krause-Zwieback, Regisseur, Autor, Darsteller, Kostüm- und Bühnenbildner, Grafiker ... Freischaffend und unter Wegs

1990

Realize

Visions

Company

The ori­gins of ILV-Fern­erkun­dung GmbH go back to the time peri­od before Ger­man reuni­fi­ca­tion. Between 1988 and 1990 founder and today’s CEO of ILV, Dipl.-Ing. Mar­tin Wag­n­er, was head of the sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy depart­ment at the for­mer lig­nite plant Bor­na (BKW Bor­na). The plant belonged to the lig­nite com­bine Bit­ter­feld and at that time com­prised 21 open-cast mines, 24 refin­ing plants and employed more than 57,000 peo­ple. In 1990, dur­ing the polit­i­cal changes, the com­bine was trans­formed into Vere­inigte Mit­teldeutsche Braunkohlen­werke AG. The result­ing MIBRAG GmbH assumed the ongo­ing oper­a­tion of the active part of the lig­nite min­ing indus­try in Cen­tral Ger­many.

For the coal indus­try in the Ger­man Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic (GDR) the Youth Research Col­lec­tive of the Mine Sur­vey­or, head­ed by Mar­tin Wag­n­er at that time, was the first to set up a dig­i­tal pho­togram­met­ric eval­u­a­tion cen­tre. From this point, the cen­tre took over the process of cen­tral aer­i­al pho­to eval­u­a­tion for the open-cast mines at BKW Bor­na.

This was fol­lowed by a con­tract to devel­op a CAD/CAM sys­tem for the open­cast mines. With a bud­get of at least 4.4 mil­lion marks the inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Youth Research Col­lec­tive began its work. Solu­tions for data stor­age and pro­vi­sion via cloud solu­tions and for data trans­mis­sion via radio and fibre optic net­works were test­ed and suc­cess­ful­ly imple­ment­ed at that time already. For this pur­pose, main­ly tech­nol­o­gy from the com­bines Carl Zeiss Jena and Robot­ron was used, but also tech­nolo­gies that were devel­oped in coop­er­a­tion with research insti­tu­tions and uni­ver­si­ties.

In 1990, the three engi­neers Mar­tin Wag­n­er, Andreas Forg­ber (for­mer head of the depart­ment of com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy at BKK Bit­ter­feld) and Beat­rix Wag­n­er (for­mer head of voca­tion­al train­ing for min­ing sur­vey­ors of the GDR’s lig­nite indus­try) found­ed the engi­neer­ing firm Inge­nieur­büro für Luft­bil­dauswer­tung und Ver­mes­sung (short: ILV).

A research group around Prof. Marek at Cen­tral Insti­tute for Physics of the Earth (today: GFZ — Geo­forschungszen­trum Pots­dam) super­vised the first space mis­sion of the GDR in 1978 with the mul­ti­spec­tral cam­era MKF 6 from Carl Zeiss Jena and the fly­ing cos­mo­naut Dr. Sig­mund Jähn.

With the foun­da­tion of ILV-Fern­erkun­dung GmbH in 2001, some high­ly qual­i­fied mem­bers of this research group, who had worked in the group “remote sens­ing” under the direc­tion of Prof. Marek until 1990, were recruit­ed into the ILV team. Until his death in 2019, Dr. Sig­mund Jähn was a close friend of ILV.

ILV-Fern­erkun­dung GmbH was found­ed with the aim to extend the com­pa­ny pro­file of the engi­neer­ing firm Inge­nieur­büro für Luft­bil­dauswer­tung und Ver­mes­sung (ILV) by the fields of research and devel­op­ment as well as fur­ther edu­ca­tion espe­cial­ly in the field of satel­lite remote sens­ing. Con­tin­u­ous tech­ni­cal devel­op­ment and invest­ments in new inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies con­sol­i­dat­ed the lead­ing posi­tion of ILV-Fern­erkun­dung GmbH in the field of dig­i­tal aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy and fur­ther pro­cess­ing to dig­i­tal 3D mod­els. A mile­stone was the tran­si­tion from ana­logue to dig­i­tal aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy at the begin­ning of the 2000s.

Since the turn of the mil­len­ni­um ILV has also been active on the African con­ti­nent. The first assign­ment came from Hous­ton, Texas and includ­ed the map­ping of the Cross-Riv­er State in Nige­ria by aer­i­al sur­vey, at that time still with black and white film mate­r­i­al. Fur­ther assign­ments in Africa fol­lowed, so that ILV was also sig­nif­i­cant­ly involved in the Africa pol­i­cy of the Ger­man Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment.

As of 2003 ILV was the first com­pa­ny to use the new dig­i­tal aer­i­al cam­era sys­tem DMC of Zeiss/Intergraph com­mer­cial­ly through­out Europe. The DMC is based on mul­ti­ple, exact­ly cal­i­brat­ed CCD-arrays and allows a remark­ably high ground res­o­lu­tion. The required posi­tion­al accu­ra­cy for the acqui­si­tion and pro­cess­ing of stereo aer­i­al images can thus be main­tained very accu­rate­ly. This sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal progress has led to a num­ber of impor­tant orders from abroad, e.g. from France, Bel­gium, Den­mark, Slove­nia, Aus­tria, Switzer­land, Ser­bia, Bosnia-Herze­gov­ina, the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, Greece, Kuwait, Sier­ra Leona, Alge­ria, Libya, Ethiopia, Nige­ria and Ghana. With more than 10.000 pho­to flights with the DMC in Ger­many and inter­na­tion­al ILV has acquired a high know-how in aer­i­al sur­vey­ing. It is one of the com­pa­nies with the most com­pre­hen­sive oper­a­tional expe­ri­ence in the Mid­dle East and Europe.

In Ger­many ILV is respon­si­ble for mon­i­tor­ing post-min­ing land­scapes in Lusa­tia and Cen­tral Ger­many and per­forms week­ly pho­to flights. Since 2008 ILV has been using a sec­ond advanced DMC to expand its nation­al and inter­na­tion­al image flight activ­i­ties.

Since 2005 ILV also uses the laser scan­ning method for the pro­duc­tion of exact ele­va­tion mod­els. In addi­tion, ILV has invest­ed in a dual ther­mal cam­era sys­tem in 2012, which can be flown in com­bi­na­tion with oth­er sen­sors, e.g. laser scan­ners. Since 2015, the equip­ment also includes an oblique cam­era sys­tem which can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly gen­er­ate five image record­ings from five view angles and thus enables the gen­er­a­tion of 3D objects.

In 2015, the new gen­er­a­tion of the DMC III cam­era sys­tem was devel­oped and from 2016 onwards it was used in ILV’s oper­a­tional busi­ness. The DMC III has a CMOS sen­sor with 391 megapix­els and mechan­i­cal for­ward com­pen­sa­tion to bal­ance “image migra­tion”. It gen­er­ates aer­i­al images with a res­o­lu­tion of up to 3 cm. With this sys­tem ILV oper­ates very suc­cess­ful­ly nowa­days, espe­cial­ly con­cern­ing larg­er fly­ing areas.

The fields of remote sens­ing, sur­vey­ing and 3D-GIS still form the core areas of ILV’s work today. But also, in the field of hydro­graph­ic sur­vey­ing ILV has been work­ing for sev­er­al years with own ships, mod­ern equip­ment and experts. From 2004 to 2006 first bathy­met­ric sur­veys (off­shore) were already real­ized in Nige­ria for the Niger­ian ExxonMobil/NNPC. ILV is also reg­u­lar­ly active on Aus­tri­an and Ger­man inland water­ways. Here mod­ern multi­beam sonar tech­nol­o­gy is used, which is oper­at­ed from own boats. Since 2019 ILV can per­form multi­beam mea­sure­ments even unmanned. The method is used in areas which are not allowed to be entered, such as blocked open-cast min­ing waste holes. For this pur­pose the boat is put by heli­copter and then oper­at­ed via remote con­trol.

Advanced GPS sys­tems such as the R10, total sta­tions such as the SX10 or the mobile map­ping sys­tem MX2 with the cor­re­spond­ing soft­ware sys­tems com­plete ILV’s sur­vey­ing port­fo­lio.