UltraMap water handling: A workflow-wide approach

Blog , Product Features

27 April 2023

Last updated on 07 May 2026

Water surfaces are among the most challenging elements in aerial photogrammetry. Reflections, waves, turbidity, and changing illumination often lead to artifacts, inconsistencies, and unnecessary processing effort. To address these challenges at scale, UltraMap applies a dedicated, workflow-wide approach to water handling.

Instead of treating water as an exception late in production, UltraMap integrates water awareness throughout the photogrammetric workflow. From automated detection to optimized processing behavior, this approach improves orthomosaics, DSMs, and DTMs over water while reducing manual correction effort. The result is more reliable data products and more efficient large-scale production, even in complex coastal, riverine, or urban waterfront environments.

Why water requires special treatment in photogrammetry

Water behaves very differently from solid terrain in aerial imagery. Its appearance can change rapidly due to wind, sun angle, traffic, or sediment, even within a single flight mission. These variations often cause mismatches between overlapping images and can lead to visible seamlines, patchy color balancing, or implausible elevation values.

Conventional photogrammetric workflows may attempt to process water surfaces in the same way as land, resulting in wasted computation time and unreliable outputs. UltraMap addresses this by explicitly identifying water early in the workflow and adapting processing steps accordingly. This prevents futile matching attempts, reduces artifacts, and supports consistent results across all derived products.

Water body with complex traffic on water (Venice, Italy)

Automated water detection with user control

UltraMap automatically derives a water mask using machine-learning-based land cover segmentation. This classification distinguishes water from land at an early stage and makes this information available throughout the processing pipeline.

Users retain full control over the result. Automatically generated water masks can be reviewed, refined, or replaced with imported vector data when project-specific knowledge is required. This combination of automation and manual quality control ensures both efficiency and reliability, regardless of project size or complexity.

Automatically extracted water mask overlaid on ortho mosaic (Turku, Finland)

Consistent orthomosaics and robust surface models

Once water areas are known, UltraMap adapts multiple processing steps to account for their unique characteristics. Color balancing, seamline generation, and blending behavior are optimized to create visually homogeneous water surfaces in orthomosaics.

At the same time, water awareness improves the robustness of elevation products. By avoiding unreliable image matching over water, UltraMap produces more stable DSM and DTM results and minimizes height artifacts in rivers, lakes, and coastal zones. This leads to cleaner datasets that require less manual post-processing.

Before color balancing

After color balancing

Correct water height even with densely vegetated river bank (Graz, Austria)

Ortho mosaic overlaid with areas of contributing images (Barcelona, Spain)

Built for scalable, professional data production

Water handling in UltraMap is not a standalone tool but part of a holistic photogrammetric workflow. The same water masks and processing logic are reused across products, enabling consistent results and faster turnaround times in large-area projects.

By reducing unnecessary computations and focusing processing effort where reliable information can be extracted, UltraMap supports efficient production at scale. This makes it well suited for national mapping programs, urban mapping, and coastal or inland water monitoring projects where water is a dominant feature.