Last week, we, 3DGeo Heidelberg (Prof. Dr. Bernhard Höfle), had a kick-off meeting for our new joint research project Extract4D, led by Prof. Dr. Katharina Anders (TU Munich, Remote Sensing Applications). Here is a sneak peek at this exciting research project.
Background
The Earth’s surface is constantly being shaped by wind, water and gravity. Observing these surface changes is crucial to understanding the underlying processes, their interactions and their environmental drivers. Using permanent terrestrial laser scanning or time-lapse photogrammetry, we can acquire time series of 3D point cloud representations, which we call 4D point clouds. Using novel change analysis algorithms, surface activities can be identified and characterized in these 4D point clouds.
About the Project
Recent methods for change analysis are still limited in their transferability and generalizability across data sources and usually work with uniformly sampled data from unimodal acquisitions. This project will focus on extracting surface dynamics from multimodal 4D point clouds acquired by various sensors at irregular time intervals, resulting in richer change information than ever before.
Objectives:
Methods
- 4D-OBC (Anders et al. 2021): Change Analysis of Natural Surfaces using 3D Time Series. Extract4D will extend and generalize this method, which extracts surface change by spatio-temporal segmentation of 4D point clouds.
- HELIOS++: Heidelberg LiDAR Operations Simulator for virtual laser scanning. For method development, we will use virtual laser scanning of a variety of surface dynamics scenarios to generate realistic simulated 4D point clouds with known change signals and semantics.
- py4dgeo: Python library for change analysis in 4D point clouds. The newly developed method will be implemented in the open source library py4dgeo to make it available to the research community. This will be done with the expertise of the Scientific Software Center (SSC).
Collaborations
In collaboration with other institutions, the project will study three cases in different geographical environments:
- Coastal dynamics in the Netherlands (Geoscience & Remote Sensing and Coastal Engineering at TU Delft)
- Soil surface processes in agriculture (TU Dresden)
- Salt marsh dynamics (Geosciences Rennes)
Further Information
You can find out more on the websites of both research groups:
- Extract4D website (TU Munich, RSA)
- Extract4D website (Uni Heidelberg, 3DGeo)
Follow the project on:
- LinkedIn (#Extract4D)
- Twitter (#Extract4D)
Funding
Extract4D is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), German Research Foundation (project number: 535733258).
