TY - JOUR AB - Purpose– Orthophoto suffers from the relief displacement effects magnified by high resolution imaging sensors especially when mapping urban areas. True orthophotos eliminating relief displacement with digital surface model (DSM) are presented to assure reliable interpretability and maintain the high quality of the available data. Previous efforts did not provide accurate and fast ways for generating true othorphoto. The purpose of this paper is to try to solve the problem by analyzing the complexity of algorithm processes and finding the optimum manner to allocate them.Design/methodology/approach– In this paper, an optimum segmentation number for radial sweep is presented to achieve minimum complexity. First, the scan area, number of azimuth lines and visibility judgment area of radial sweep and spiral sweep method have been discussed with rigorous geometric theory, and then algorithm complexities of both methods are estimated with mathematical computation theory. Finally, minimum complexity of the methods is obtained with extreme point theory of differential calculus.Findings– Experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method has the best efficiency, and is efficient to avoid “M‐potion” problem, and false occlusions and false visibilities caused by the rolling area, the incompatibility between the DSM and ground image resolution.Originality/value– The deduction and experiments indicate that the proposed method is a robust, accurate, fast, and effective approach to generate high quality, true orthophoto at a large‐scale. VL - 31 IS - 4 SN - 0260-2288 DO - 10.1108/02602281111169758 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/02602281111169758 AU - Zhong Cheng AU - Li Hui AU - Huang Xianfeng PY - 2011 Y1 - 2011/01/01 TI - A fast and effective approach to generate true orthophoto in built‐up area T2 - Sensor Review PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 341 EP - 348 Y2 - 2024/03/29 ER -