Category: Publications

  • New method for drainage ditch extraction from airborne LiDAR point clouds

    In our most recent 3DGeo publication, colleagues from KU Leuven together with us developed a new method to extract drainage ditches from LiDAR point clouds in a fully automatic process. Ditches are often absent in hydrographic geodatasets and their mapping would benefit from a cost and labor effective alternative to field surveys. We propose and…

  • An exploration of the interaction between urban human activities and daily traffic conditions: A case study of Toronto, Canada

    Understanding how citizens interact with transportation system is a key to solving a variety of urban issues in general and traffic congestion in particular. Recently, scholars have put efforts on the pertinent work ranging from developing traffic predictors to understanding human mobility and activity patterns. Multiple types of data have been used, of which crowdsourced…

  • Hyperspectral and LiDAR Fusion Using Deep Three-Stream Convolutional Neural Networks

    Our feature paper “Hyperspectral and LiDAR Fusion Using Deep Three-Stream Convolutional Neural Networks” is now published online. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been intensively investigated for the classification of remote sensing data by extracting invariant and abstract features suitable for classification. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed for the fusion of hyperspectral…

  • Deep Learning from Multiple Crowds: A Case Study of Humanitarian Mapping

    Our paper about Deep Learning from Multiple Crowds: A Case Study of Humanitarian Mapping is available online now. Satellite images are widely applied in humanitarian mapping which labels buildings, roads and so on for humanitarian aid and economic development. However, the labeling now is mostly done by volunteers. In a recently accepted study, we utilize deep…

  • Do people communicate about their whereabouts? Investigating the relation between user-generated text messages and Foursquare check-in places

    The social functionality of places (e.g. school, restaurant) partly determines human behaviors and reflects a region’s functional configuration. Semantic descriptions of places are thus valuable to a range of studies of humans and geographic spaces. Assuming their potential impacts on human verbalization behaviors, one possibility is to link the functions of places to verbal representations…

  • Open access publication of airborne laser scanning data of Arctic permafrost region

    Airborne laser scanning (ALS) data of the Arctic permafrost research region Trail Valley Creek (TVC) has just been published for open access on the data library PANGAEA: Anders, Katharina; Antonova, Sofia; Boike, Julia; Gehrmann, Martin; Hartmann, Jörg; Helm, Veit; Höfle, Bernhard; Marsh, Philip; Marx, Sabrina; Sachs, Torsten (2018): Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) Point Clouds of…

  • Mapping cultural ecosystem services 2.0 – using machine learning annotated photos to learn how humans perceive landscapes and ecosystems

    Ecosystems provide many different services to mankind. Services provided depend on how the land is used – land use decisions lead to trade-offs that with respect to the ecosystem service provided by ecosystems and landscapes. This trade-offs vary in many situations in space and time. Therefore, it is essential to quantify and map service provisioning…

  • GSIS Special Issue on Crowdsourcing for Urban Geoinformatics has been published

    GSIS Special Issue: Crowdsourcing for Urban Geoinformatics. Geo-Spatial Information Science (GSIS), Volume 23, Issue 3. Taylor & Francis. Guest Editors: Hongchao Fan, Rene Westerholt, João Porto de Albuquerque, Bernd Resch and Alexander Zipf TOC: Do people communicate about their whereabouts? Investigating the relation between user-generated text messages and Foursquare check-in places Ming Li, Rene Westerholt & Alexander…

  • Capturing Flood Risk Perception via Sketch Maps

    The flood risk perception of people living in areas at risk can be a valuable source of information for mitigation and preparedness within disaster management. We apply a method based on sketch maps and questionnaires to capture this flood risk perception during case studies in Santiago de Chile. Results of our study can be found…

  • Today & tomorrow GIScience Heidelberg Talks in Africa and Australia

    This Wednesday and Thursday we have presentations from the GIScience research group Heidelberg on two remote contintents – both in Africa and in Australia: On Wednesday: First down under at GIScience Melbourne in Australia Rene Westerholt will present the work related to our PLATIAL18 workshop: Westerholt, R., Gröbe, M., Zipf, A. and Burghardt, D. (2018): Towards the statistical…

  • GIScience Heidelberg @ GIScience Melbourne

    Two papers from GIScience Heidelberg have been contributed to and accepted for the 10th International GIScience Conference 2018 in Melbourne, Australia. They will be presented on Wednesday and Thursday respectively. Looking forward to a fruitful discussion! Westerholt, R., Gröbe, M., Zipf, A. and Burghardt, D. (2018): Towards the statistical analysis and visualization of places. 10th…

  • The Dimension of a Space Can Be Inferred From the Abstract Network Structure

    Study shows that spatial reference can be structurally identified in a number of datasets F.-B. Mocnik: The Polynomial Volume Law of Complex Networks in the Context of Local and Global Optimization. Scientific Reports (2018) 8:11274, doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-29131-0 Networks describe relations between objects. They show how objects relate to one another and which ones are mutually…