The International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) announced today that Prof. Wolfgang Förstner of Bonn University, Germany, will be presented with the 2016 Brock Gold Medal Award for his outstanding scientific achievements in the fields of photogrammetry and computer vision.
Professor Förstner is an internationally leading expert in photogrammetry, computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning. Throughout his exemplary career of nearly 40 years as a researcher, inventor, innovator and educator, he has made exceptionally significant scientific contributions
in many areas of Information from Imagery and mentored generations of mapping scientists and engineers. Examples of his work include blunder detection for aerial triangulation, image matching, object recognition and statistical projective geometry. The well known Förstner Operator, for the detection of key points in images, was developed by him in the 1980’s. After studying Geodesy and Surveying, Förstner first worked at the University of Stuttgart before moving to the University of Bonn as Professor for Photogrammetry from 1990 until his retirement in 2012. Although now formally retired, he continues his scientific activities.
The Brock Gold Medal is sponsored by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) and is awarded to an individual in respect of an outstanding landmark in the evolution of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences. Funds for the provision of the medals were given in memory of brothers, Arthur and Norman Brock, early American photogrammetrists who, with Edward Cahill, developed aerial cameras and plotting instruments. Instituted in 1952 by the then International Society of Photogrammetry (ISP) and first presented in 1956, the Brock Gold Medal Award is the most prestigious ISPRS award, it is presented only once every four years during the quadrennial ISPRS Congress.
Förstner will receive the award on 12 July 2016, during the opening session of the XXIII ISPRS Congress to be held in Prague, Czech Republic. The quadrennial Congress brings together the global community of scientists and technologists in the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences and is expected to be visited by some 3000 to 4000 participants over its week long duration.
ISPRS is the foremost global non-governmental organization that promotes international cooperation between the worldwide organizations with interests in the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences. Established in 1910, ISPRS is the oldest international umbrella organization in its field, which may be summarized as addressing Information from imagery.

Cyrill Stachniss have a plenary talk at the ISPRS 2016 Congress in Prague on autonomous robots exploring Roman Catacombs and mobile vehicles navigating through urban environments (EC funded projects ROVINA and EUROPA2).

See the ISPRS 2016 Congress Website for details.

Visit our UAV-g 2017 Website!

In September 2017, we are organizing the UAV-g 2017 conference in Bonn. The aim of UAV-g 2017 is to bring together experts in photogrammetry and remote sensing, surveying, robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence, aerospace engineering, geosciences and various UAV user communities. Researchers, developers, service and systems providers as well as users are invited to contribute with presentations, posters, exhibitions, live demonstrations and discussions to create synergies between research and applications using UAV in Geomatics. UAV-g 2017 will take place in Bonn, Germany on September 4-7, 2017 and is the 4th edition of the International Conference on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Geomatics.

Prospective authors are encouraged to submit their paper contributions on the following topics among others:

• Platforms, payloads and instruments for photogrammetry and remote sensing,
• Navigation and position/orientation determination,
• Light-weight GNSS,
• Dense image matching and surface reconstruction,
• 3D reconstruction from oblique images,
• 3D reconstruction from range sensors,
• Simultaneous localization and mapping,
• Cooperative UAV/UAV and UAV/UGV systems,
• Low altitude thematic remote sensing and environmental mapping,
• UAV control,
• Obstacle sense and avoidance,
• Autonomous flight and exploration,
• On-line and real-time processing,
• Sensor and data fusion Monitoring, tracking and change detection,
• Semantic scene interpretation,
• Technology challenges and applications,
• Regulations

The team from the photogrammetry lab presented six papers and one tutorial talk at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Stockholm this year. Great talk and great discussions.

We are currently conducting long-term data collection, perception and navigation experiments with the Bonirob platform of ALU-FR used in the Flourish project at the Campus Klein-Altendorf.

The ROVINA Consortium successfully finishes the 3rd year review of the project demonstrating autonomous exploration, semantic annotations and robust homing in the Priscilla catacomb in Rome. See examples videos on our media page.

The Section on Geoinformatics (Sektion Geoinformatik) of the German Geodetic Commission (Deutsche Geodätische Kommission, DGK) and the Working Group on Geoinformatics (Arbeitskreis Geoinformatik) of the German Society for Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photogrammetrie, Fernerkundung und Geoinformation, DGPF) will hold their second joint PhD colloquium on February 23, 2016 at the University of Bonn. The colloquium aims to stimulate scientific exchange between young researchers in the interdisciplinary field of geoinformatics. It is targeted at PhD students who have already made considerable advances in their PhD projects and are able and highly motivated to share their findings.
PhD students from all disciplines dealing with methods for the processing of geospatial information (e.g., geoinformatics, photogrammetry, computer science, cartography, geography, remote sensing) are welcome. We particularly invite PhD students working on problems related to the focus topic “Methodology of Mobile and Dynamic Systems”.

This includes but is not limited to the following problems:

• Motion prediction, detection of movement patterns, and trajectory analysis
• Mapping in dynamic environments
• Simultaneous localization and mapping
• Integration and analysis of data from mobile sensors
• Algorithms for dynamic and interactive maps
• Representation and analysis of multi-temporal data, e.g., video or remote sensing data
• Estimation of semantic information from sensor data

On Feb, 22 the Section for Geoinformation, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing of the German Geodetic Commission (DGK) meets in Bonn.

We are happy that from Feb 11 on, Jens Behley joins our Photogrammetry Lab as a new postdoc.