Creating digital gold

The National Collection of Aerial Photography (NCAP) dataset's aerial photographs are of a significantly higher resolution than state-of-the-art satellite imagery and provide insights into what large areas of the Earth looked like as far back as the 1920s. This dataset could potentially underpin world-leading research in fields such as climate change, Earth observation, agritech, history, the evolution of land use, and many more. 

EPCC has been working with NCAP on its digitisation programme, looking at the most data-efficient way of digitally storing this vast collection of imagery. We have helped optimise NCAP's robotic system to automate the digitisation of flat photographs on an array of 100 bed scanners, which can perform the task 24 hours a day.

NCAP Head, Allan Williams, says: “The collection contains more than 150,000 boxes of prints, photographic films and associated records housed in satellite storage, and because much of it is very old there is the risk of deterioration. So we’ve now got the challenge of extracting the information from the analogue record, converting it into a high resolution digital format so we can put it onto our online systems to make it accessible.”

NCAP's largest customer base comes from the Explosive Ordnance Disposal sector in Europe. Its Second World War post-strike aerial photographs are vital to pinpoint the entry point of unexploded bombs in the ground and this is essential information for land developers in their risk assessments. 

Learn more about this fascinating project in this article on the University of Edinburgh website: Turning 30 million old photos into digital gold.