The last two weeks saw the World Geospatial Forum, Rotterdam and the ISPRS Hannover Workshop where the latest research and commercial activities in photogrammetry and remote sensing were presented.
Only attending the final day of the World Geospatial Forum meant a chance to attend the Technology Forums. These consisted of presentations from commercial vendors such as Leica Geosystems, RIEGL and Optech showing their latest hardware and software developments as well as universities and research institutes presenting their work. The final session of the day, entitled ‘3D – the next challenge for national mapping agencies’, presented how methods developed in research were being utilised by the Dutch national mapping agency for the reconstruction of buildings at the Level of Detail 2, in accordance with the CityGML standard. Although a very commercial conference some resources were sourced for the research into automated 3d building reconstruction.
After a nice weekend trip to Köln enjoying the sights and the sunshine, the ISPRS Hannover Workshop about High-Resolution Earth Imaging for Geospatial Information began. Talks included data collected from space all the way down to the bottom of the ocean for various applications. Across the four days keynote presentations were given by Rainer Sandau of DLR in Berlin who spoke about how space collected data can be used for disaster management and the integration of data, Lorenzo Bruzzone from Trento university spoke about the challenges and trends of multitemportal imagery and Charles Toth, the current ISPRS Commission 1 president, spoke about the different platforms available for data collection. The final keynote was Michael McCullagh from Nottingham University who spoke, a little off topic, about crowd source data. Several interesting examples were given, some closely related to the Twitter work undertaken by Newcastle whilst presenting a website (www.ushahibi.com) for a non-profit company promoting open-sourced data.
Research institutes and universities presented their current research which led to many discussions being carried on in the coffee breaks. Newcastle’s Abdulhamed Gneeniss presented his PhD work on the integration of photogrammetric and lidar data for aerial triangulation and camera calibration alongside several other young researchers, presenting in both oral and poster formats. Two poster sessions portrayed varying amounts of research including UAVs, GPS solutions and building detection from differing sourced data.
The conference’s main sponsors, Hexagon, gave a master class in the new hardware and software they have developed. After a brief overview of the company’s history, the company’s new large-format and medium format cameras were presented as well as their new oblique camera systems. The software included their photogrammetric software developed by tridicon, which included semi-global matching algorithms for point cloud generation from aerial imagery as well as automated 3D building reconstruction.
Social activities included an ice-breaker evening on the rooftop of the Leibniz Hannover university’s Institute of Photogrammetry and Geoinformation and the conference dinner at the Wilhelm Busch Museum where extravagant buffets were laid with some nice local beer to taste. These gave a great opportunity to discuss in further detail the research presented in the day and way to get to know people.
Thank you to Christian Heipke and the team at Leibniz Hannover University for organising such a captivating conference.