International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
Commission III - Photogrammetric Computer Vision and Image Analysis
Working Group III / 5 - Road Extraction and Traffic Monitoring, 2004 - 2008
 

Annual reports

Annual Report WG III/5 for year 2007

The working group's activities in 2007 were mainly concentrated on the preparation and organization of PIA07 - the Photogrammetric Image Analysis Conference at Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany.
This joint conference of ISPRS working groups I/2, III/2, III/4, III/5, and IV/3, held at Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), discussed recent developments, the potential of various data sources, and future trends both with respect to sensors and processing techniques in automatic object extraction. The focus of the conference was on methodological research, while the range of topics covered is reflected by the cooperating ISPRS working groups:

Authors were invited to submit a full paper of maximum 6 pages and we received 49 papers for review. The presented papers have undergone a rigorous "double blind" review process of full papers, with a rejection rate of 30%. Each paper was reviewed at least by three members of the program committee. Accepted papers (34) and one invited paper are published as printed proceedings in the ISPRS series as well as on CD labelled as "Part A". Only a subset of these papers was presented orally due to the single track design of PIA07 and the generous time slots for intensive discussion.
Authors who intended to present application oriented work that was in particular suitable for interactive presentation were invited to submit an extended abstract. A group of the program committee selected 32 out of 55 contributions for presentation. Accepted contributions based on abstract review were invited to submit full papers which are published on CD labelled as "Part B".
In total, we received contributions from authors coming from 26 countries. The proceedings include 66 papers from authors coming from 19 countries. The schedule comprised 7 oral sessions with altogether 20 papers and two interactive sessions where 46 papers will be presented.
The proceedings appeared in the ISPRS Archives under following citations:

Thanks to the collaboration with EuroSDR, esp. Prof. H. Mayer, we were able to make aerial and satellite images for road extraction purposes available. These data were used in the EuroSDR road extraction test, for which eight test images were prepared from different aerial and satellite sensors. All images have a size of at least 4,000 x 4,000 pixels. In practice, this was found to be insurmountable by nearly all approaches which participated. Hence it was eventually decided to cut out three smaller parts with 1,600 x 1,600 pixels. The Ikonos images were taken over Kosovo and provided by Bundeswehr, Geoinformation Office (AGeoBw), Euskirchen, Germany, given as pan-sharpened images in red, green, blue, and infrared. Furthermore, 3 scanned aerial images were provided by the Federal Office of Topography, Bern, Switzerland (image scale 1 : 16 000, focal length 0.3m, RGB, 0.5m ground resolution). The scene characteristics comprised urban and suburban area in hilly terrain, hilly rural areas with medium complexity, as well as a hilly rural scene with low complexity

The German SAR satellite TerraSAR-X was successfully launched in June, 2007. We submitted a proposal for scientific use of TerraSAR-X data, which has been accepted by the reviewers. Currently, discussions are under way to ultimately provide these data to WG members after the satellite's commissioning phase, which is assumed to be completed by the end of 2007.

Uwe Stilla

Last changed: 2008-03-10
by Uwe Stilla