Photo: COWI A/S

Oblique photos 

High resolution oblique photos of urban areas allow you to see buildings, infrastructure and streets from different angles with a high degree of detail.

Take advantage of the fact that you can evaluate any urban area from at least four different views (e.g. North-South, East-West), which is not feasible in a standard orthophoto. This results in applications in which you can click on an object of interest in the orthophoto or 2D map and get immediately the oblique views of the same object, with a high degree of detail by zooming in.

Additionally the user may be able to measure distances, areas and slopes in the images. The geo-referenced oblique photos provide valuable information about buildings such as number of floors, access and backyard layouts, materials, advertising panels etc.

Photo: COWI A/S

Safety & Security
Oblique photos help in the resource planning process to define the location, access and local circumstances of an incident faster and more accurate, which results in a detailed situation awareness to safe and rescue more lives. Beyond that, oblique photos are used as a support tool to plan the access, disposition types, location of fire protection installations etc. for specific objects.

Urban Planning


Oblique photos help to evaluate the visual impact of new planned buildings within an existing urban surrounding and can be used to demonstrate and document the change in appearance of urban areas. If a virtual 3D city model is requested for urban planning, the oblique images are used for the creation of such data.
Further applications of oblique photos are within location based services, insurance, real estate and urban development.

Technical aspects
COWI’s oblique photos are taken from a flying height of 450-500 meter with an angle of 35-45 degrees and have a ground resolution of down to 5 cm per pixel. The images overlap each other with approx. 65% which makes them usable for photogrammetric stereo measurement, where 3D coordinates (e.g. of buildings, trees etc.) can be derived. COWI has a flexible capturing platform that can adapt to specific customer needs and requests.