Georeferencing of the Third Military Survey of Austrian Monarchy Ing. Milan Talich, Ph.D., Dr. Ing. Lubomír Soukup, Ing. Jan Havrlant, Ph.D., Ing. Klára Ambrožová, Ing. Ondřej Böhm, Ing. Filip Antoš Research Institute of Geodesy, Topography and Cartography, Ústecká 98, CZ 250 66 Zdiby, Czech Republic Milan.Talich@vugtk.cz Abstract. A novel procedure for georeferencing raster images of the Third Military Survey maps from 19th century (1876-1880) is proposed in the contribution. There were several attempts to design a proper transfor- mation model for georeferencing of these maps, but none of them have sat- isfactory resolved crucial problems of positional discrepancy between the old maps and contemporary maps (almost 150 m in reality). In the contri- bution, these problems are approached with the aid of three unique princi- ples. 1. Huge number of control points was utilized to properly match the old maps to the contemporary coordinate system. The set of the control points was validated by means of statistical tests. 2. A complex transformation procedure comprising of four partial se- quential transformation steps (rectification of paper shrinkage, reverse pro- jection of a map sheet onto ellipsoid, cartographic projection from the ellip- soid to plane, special elastic 2D transformation). The most important step is the special elastic transformation witch corrects inhomogeneous distortions of the old map sheets. Simultaneously, precision of an arbitrary point can be easily estimated. 3. The transformation model is adjustable by a simple set of parame- ters with comprehensible meaning, namely standard deviation of the per- missible positional discrepancy.