Category: Research

  • Leaf-off UAV-borne laser scanning

    Members of the 3DGeo research group were recently taking advantage of the good weather to acquire some more data within the DFG-funded project SYSSIFOSS. We packed the drone and the RIEGL miniVUX-1UAV laser scanner, and drove to the forest near Bretten where 8 of our plots are located. In four days and 16 flights we…

  • Cartographic Vandalism in the Era of Location-Based Games—The Case of OpenStreetMap and Pokémon

    User-generated map data is increasingly used by the technology industry for background mapping, navigation and beyond. An example is the integration of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data in widely-used smartphone and web applications, such as Pokémon GO (PGO), a popular augmented reality smartphone game. As a result of OSM’s increased popularity, the worldwide audience that uses OSM…

  • ISPRS IJGI highlights our work on deep learning of Street Art from VGI and Street View Images

    We are pleased to share that because of the response to our work, ISPRS IJGI selected our paper on Detecting Graffiti with Street View Images and Deep Learning to be highlighted as a title story through some graphics on the journals main page. Novack T, Vorbeck L, Lorei H, Zipf A. (2020): Towards Detecting Building Facades…

  • GIScience Heidelberg at Annual Meeting of DGPF

    Last week, members of GIScience Heidelberg participated in the 40th annual meeting of the DGPF (German association for photogrammetry and remote sensing) in Stuttgart, Germany. Presentations were contributed by PhD students Lukas Winiwarter and Katharina Anders (3DGeo Research Group), as well as former GIScience fellow Jun-Prof. Dr. René Westerholt. Read up on the presented topics…

  • MapSwipe wins Global Mobile Award for the Best Mobile Innovation Supporting Emergency or Humanitarian Situations

    This week, at the prestigious GSMA MWC series (formally known as Mobile World Congress) MapSwipe was awarded the top prize in the Global Mobile Awards’ category for the Best Mobile Innovation Supporting Emergency or Humanitarian Situations. The award recognizes how mobile connectivity can provide a lifeline in major humanitarian disasters, providing access to critical information and…

  • Volunteered Geographic Information research in the first decade: a narrative review of selected journal articles in GIScience

    More than 10 years have passed since the coining of the term volunteered geographic information (VGI) in 2007. A recently published article presents the results of a review of the literature concerning VGI. A total of 346 articles published in 24 international refereed journals in GIScience between 2007 and 2017 have been reviewed. The review has…

  • Treeathlon – 3D tree mapathon

    On Tuesday, 25.02.2020, the 3DGeo group and the SYSSIFOSS project partner from KIT organised a collaborative data processing event. 24 participants spent 6 hours (10:00-16:00) extracting individual trees from airborne LiDAR forest point clouds. In the SYSSIFOSS project, the segmented 3D tree models are required to simulate 3D forest stands when combined with a forest…

  • Concluding field work in the dunes around Erg Chebbi

    The last days of field work in Erg Chebbi continued at the star dune to wrap up final tasks: filling gaps in the data, adding some dune arms to the ground penetrating radar data, … All data acquisition at the star dune was concluded successfully, although the group was off to a late start. The…

  • Halftime reports from Erg Chebbi

    After three days of hard work in the field, Sunday was halftime workshop at HeidelErg. with diverse topics all around dunes, with and beyond the data collected in ErgChebbi. Manuel Herzog introduced the first results from the geophysical measurements with regards to dune stratification. Ground penetrating radar in combination with Electrical Resistivity Tomography already shows…

  • Behavioural Effects of Spatially Structured Scoring Systems in Location-Based Serious Games – A Case Study in the Context of OpenStreetMap

    Location-based games have become popular in recent years, with Pokémon Go and Ingress being two very prominent examples. Some location-based games, known as Serious Games, go beyond entertainment and serve additional purposes such as data collection. Such games are also found in the OpenStreetMap context and playfully enrich the project’s geodatabase. Examples include Kort and…

  • First results of our multi-method field course in an aeolian sand dune field

    During the first three days of the field course in Erg Chebi, data collection focussed on the star dune with groups of students applying different techniques of geophysical and topographic surveying. Today, data was checked to plan the remaining three field days. A recap of this intermediate data revision will follow. For today, we’d like…

  • Multi-method field course in an aeolian sand dune field

    This week, the research groups Geomorphology and 3DGeo of the Institute of Geography at Heidelberg University are conducting a field course in the aeolian sand dune field Erg Chebbi in Morocco. The current field course is the second edition of “HeidelErg“. The aim is to teach students different methods of data acquisition for physical geography,…