ISPRS 2023 Scientific Initiative Awards Seven international projects boosted by ISPRS funds

Every two years, ISPRS awards up to 10,000 Swiss francs each to one-year projects or ‘scientific initiatives’. According to ISPRS regulations, these funds “… further improve ISPRS’s international status in the fields of photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences, and benefit all ISPRS members. [They] strengthen the Society’s scientific activities undertaken by the Technical Commissions.”

Many projects result in comparative assessments and the creation of benchmark datasets, which are becoming increasingly critical as deep learning supersedes handcrafted algorithms.

2023 Winners

This year, the following seven projects were chosen to receive awards. All principal investigators (PIs) are accomplished professors or senior research scientists, and one is also a physician:

• Benchmarking of absolute and relative positioning solutions under GNSS-denied environments for mobile geomatics, Yunsheng Wang (Finland) and Liang Chen (China)

• Publishing dataset guidelines: gaps and trends in research data management in the ISPRS community, Dorota Iwaszczuk (Germany)

• BeBaOI: Benchmark and Baseline Methods for determining Overlapping Images, Xin Wang (China) and Yu Feng (Germany)

• NAUTILUS (uNder And throUgh waTer datasets for geospatIaL stUdieS), Erica Nocerino (Italy)

• Benchmarking of publicly available software solutions for close-range point cloud processing of forest ecosystems, Carlos Cabo (Spain) and Xinlian Liang (China)

• Geospatial data base for exposomics, Kamel Boulos (Portugal)

• Integrating indoorGML with outdoors: Automatic routing graph generation for indoor-outdoor transitional space for seamless navigation, Zhiyong Wang (China)

Education and Capacity Building Initiatives (ECBIs)

In the even years, ISPRS makes similar awards for ECBIs. These are projects that “… include initiatives to strengthen the Society’s educational activities undertaken by the Technical Commissions and/or related structures and organizations, as well as new publicity and management issues.” The call for ECBI2024 proposals will be posted by ISPRS in autumn 2023. The winners will be announced around the end of the year so that the projects can kick off at the beginning of 2024. In addition to SIs and ECBIs, which are awarded biennially, ISPRS’s philanthropic arm – The ISPRS Foundation – provides travel grants. These enable selected students and early-career researchers to present their work at ISPRS and ISPRS-sponsored events, such as the Geospatial Week in Cairo in September 2023.

More info

Summaries of the projects: https://www. isprs.org/society/si/default.aspx