Category: Research
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Post-doctoral Research Visit at African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town
From January to March 2025, Dr. Steffen Knoblauch undertook a post-doctoral research visit at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town, South Africa. His research focused on integrating Earth Observation data with bioacoustics, building on his PhD work in spatiotemporal mosquito monitoring for diseases such as Dengue. The primary focus of his…
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New Paper: “Paved or unpaved? A Deep Learning derived Road Surface Global Dataset from Mapillary Street-View Imagery”
The paper addresses the global shortage of detailed road surface data by leveraging street-view imagery from Mapillary and advanced deep learning techniques. Traditional datasets like OpenStreetMap (OSM) often lack comprehensive road surface attributes—with only about 30–40% coverage—hindering applications such as travel time estimation, disaster response routing, urban planning, and environmental assessments. To fill this gap,…
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Harnessing UAV Technology to Support Municipal Solid Waste Management
The full article was originally published on geoawesome. The management of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) represents a significant challenge, particularly in regions lacking adequate waste management infrastructure. In Africa, several regions are identified as critical hotspots for waste mismanagement. In 2012, only 55% of MSW was collected across Africa, with a mere 4% being recycled,…
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Silver Ways: Enhancing Walkability for Older Adults in 15-Minute Cities
The 15-minute city concept is gaining traction in urban planning, aiming to ensure that essential services are within a short walk or bike ride. As the older population grows, walking remains a key factor in their well-being, yet their mobility is highly dependent on the built environment. A new research project, Silver Ways, is tackling…
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New paper “STVAE: Skip connection driven two-stream property Fusion Variational AutoEncoder for cross-region wastewater treatment plant semantic segmentation”
Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) play a crucial role in maintaining ecological balance and public health and are essential for advancing social sustainable development goals. However, the diverse architectural styles, scales, and environmental contexts of WWTPs—shaped by climate, topography, and regional economic conditions—pose significant challenges for generalizing segmentation algorithms. To address this, integrating knowledge from different…
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OSM Completeness with Overture maps data
Free and open-source map data has become a keystone for research across diverse fields. The extensive coverage of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data allows scientists to conduct independent studies without relying on corporate collaborations or investing heavily in proprietary datasets. However, OSM data coverage completeness varies significantly by location. Moreover, the latest data updates cannot always be…
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ohsome-py 4.0.0
The ohsome-py Python package is a client for the ohsome API, designed to facilitate the extraction and analysis of historical OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. The package simplifies handling API requests and responses by converting them into pandas or GeoPandas data frames, making data analysis and visualization easier. With ohsome-py, you gain all the functionalities of the…
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Announcing openrouteservice version 9.0.0: codename “Europa”
We are proud to announce the release of openrouteservice version 9.0.0, codename “Europa”. In this release, there are a number of new features that make running your own instance a whole lot easier, and some changes that improve the general routing results. For our API users, this release will not mean much, as just a…
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Major HELIOS++ Release: v2.0.0
We are happy to release a new major version of HELIOS++: https://github.com/3dgeo-heidelberg/helios/releases What’s new in this release? Installation The new way to install HELIOS++ is via the conda or mamba package managers. We recommend mamba or micromamba. After creating a dedicated Python environment for your HELIOS++ project and activating it, run: mamba install helios or…
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Research Visit to Rio de Janeiro
Building on ongoing efforts to enhance urban health management and mosquito-borne disease monitoring in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, PhD candidate Steffen Knoblauch returned to the city for a second visit deepen collaborations and explore further applications of his research findings. He delivered lectures at several research institutions such as Universidade Federal do Rio…
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Reorganising land use: balancing food, water, and carbon storage
How can humanity meet the growing demand for food while addressing climate change and preserving vital water resources? A recent lecture by Sven Lautenbach, based on a paper addressing global land management, revisited this critical question. The findings reveal that a radical spatial reorganisation of land use could double food production, conserve water, and significantly…
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Kick-off: Extract4D Project
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…