ISPRS TECHNICAL COMMISSION III

PHOTOGRAMMETRIC COMPUTER VISION AND IMAGE ANALYSIS

President: Wolfgang Förstner

Vice - President: Helmut Mayer

Secretary: Karl-Heiko Ellenbeck

Workshops

In 2006 the working groups of Commission III left place for the symposia. However, chairmen were in the review committee of IGARSS 2006, and performed Workshop "25 Years RANSAC" (http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/ransac-cvpr2006/).

Test Data

All WGs were very active in preparing a test data set for benchmarking.

1. WG III/1 prepares a test data set for automatic orientation until early 2007

2. WG III/2 prepared a test data set for multi-view stereo (http://vision.middlebury.edu/mview/). They also added 20 more image pairs for stereo analysis (http://cat.middlebury.edu/stereo/). Finally

3. WG III/3 prepared a comparative test on the performance of algorithms for tree extraction (http://www.commission3.isprs.org/wg3/) in collaboration with EuroSDR Commission II.

4. WG III/4 prepares test data set for building extraction in order to perform an international test on update of buildings in cooperation with EuroSDR.

5. WG III/5 performed a test on "Automated extraction, refinement, and update of road databases from imagery and other data" in collaboration with EuroSDR (http://www.eurosdr.net/2002/research/recentproj.asp?ResProjID=4)

6. ICWG III/V made available a test data set for object recognition (http://vis.uky.edu/%7Estewe/ukbench/)

The data for benchmarking not all were published properly. This will take place in the near future.

Symposium 2006

The symposium "Photogrammetric Computer Vision" (PCV'06) took place from 20.-22. 09. 2006 in Bonn and was sponsored by the German Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (DGPF). The title "Photogrammetric Computer Vision", already used for the previous symposium 2002 in Graz, reflects the ongoing and increasing interaction between Photogrammetry and computer vision.

We decided to select the papers in a double blind review process only. This was new for ISPRS Symposia, but follows the trend of many ISPRS workshops in the last years and of course closes the gap in the reviewing procedure with conferences in the computer vision community. From 70 submitted papers the program committee carefully selected 44 papers, 24 being presented orally and 20 being presented as posters. The reviewers did an excellent job, guaranteeing a high standard for this conference.

The attendance was very good: we had 123 attendances from 14 countries, thus nearly three times the number of accepted papers and about five times the number of oral presentations. This proves that rejecting papers within the reviewing process not necessarily leads to a low number of participants.

The level of presentations was very high, both oral and posters. This was explicitly appreciated by many participants. The time per oral presentation was 30 minutes, which left enough time for discussion, which in all cases was exploited by the audience. The three best papers, two oral one poster, obtained an award.

The proceedings are available online via http://www.ipb.uni-bonn.de/isprs/pcv06/files/proceeding/FINAL/final-proceeding-9neu.pdf and in hard copy via Reed Business Geo bv, P.O.Box 112,8530 AC Lemmer, The Netherlands.

Plans for 2007

The working groups have the following plans for the next two years.

WG III/1:

• Prepare test data for fully automatic relative orientation until beginning of 2007

• 2007: 2^nd Workshop "Benchmarking Calibration, Orientation and Surface Reconstruction from Images (BenCOS)" in conjunction with CVPR'06 (Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, taking place annually in the USA) in Minnesota and together with WG III/2.\

WG III/2:

• 2007: Working Group III/2 will participate to the Joint Workshop on Remote Sensing and Data Fusion over Urban Areas URBAN 2007 workshop in Paris.

• 2007: 2^nd Workshop "Benchmarking Calibration, Orientation and Surface Reconstruction from Images (BenCOS)" in conjunction with CVPR'06 (Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, taking place annually in the USA) in Minnesota and together with WG III/2.

WG III/3

• 2007: September 10-14, Second workshop Laser scanning 2007 in Espoo, Finland.

WG III/4

• 2007: PIA'07 Photogrammetric Image Analysis, Munich, Germany, together with WG III/5

WG III/5

• 2007, April, Organize an invited session of URBAN Conference in Paris, France

• 2007, September 19-21, Organize a conference on "Photogrammetric Image Analysis" (PIA) in conjunction with the other working groups of Commission III, follow up of the 2003 conference to be held in Munich, Germany, http://www.ipk.bv.tum.de/isprs/pia07/

Congress 2008

Commission III will again offer a peer review process. Thus papers are either evaluated base on abstract or on full papers. The review process together with a rebuttal phase will be organised by Commission III. All WG-Chairmen are part of the program committee. Additional researchers will help in the reviewing process.

We want to take the opportunity to thank all working group chairmen and their staff for their brilliant works in the last year and look forward to a fruitful cooperation in the next 2 years.