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GIScience Blog

Category: Research

  • 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,…

  • New project: LOKI – Airborne Observation of Critical Infrastructures

    On Feb 12, 2020, the kick-off meeting for the newly funded BMBF project LOKI – Airborne Observation of Critical Infrastructures (Luftgestützte Observation Kritischer Infrastrukturen) was hosted by the GIScience and 3DGeo research groups of Heidelberg University. The aim of the LOKI project is to develop an interdisciplinary system that enables fast and reliable airborne situation…

  • HELIOS used in a study on hetero-integration which enables fast switching time-of-flight sensors for light detection and ranging

    The Heidelberg LiDAR Operations Simulator (HELIOS) is an open source laser scanning simulation framework for interactive simulation and visualization of terrestrial, mobile and airborne laser scanning surveys. It can be flexibly used for teaching and training of laser scanning, development of new scanner hardware and scanning methods, or generation of artificial scan data sets to…

  • Multitemporal Terrestrial Laser Scanning Point Clouds for Thaw Subsidence Observation

    New paper on “Multitemporal Terrestrial Laser Scanning Point Clouds for Thaw Subsidence Observation at Arctic Permafrost Monitoring Sites” The paper investigates different methods for quantifying thaw subsidence using terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) point clouds. Thaw subsidence is a slow (mm‐cm per year) vertical displacement of the ground surface common in ice‐rich permafrost‐underlain landscapes. It is…

  • 3DGeo licensed drone pilots

    During the last weeks, members of the 3DGeo group were found studying for the “Kenntnisnachweisprüfung”, the official examination for drone pilots in Germany. Today, we are proud to announce that all six applicants from our group have passed both the theoretical test as well as a practical exam where they had to show their capability…

  • Detecting OSM Building Facades with Graffiti Artwork Based on Street View Images and Social Media using Deep Learning

    As a recognized type of art, graffiti is a cultural asset and an important aspect of a city’s aesthetics. As such, graffiti is associated with social and commercial vibrancy and is known to attract tourists. However, positional uncertainty and incompleteness are current issues of open geo-datasets containing graffiti data. In a newly published paper, we…

  • GIScience Contributions to the 2019 State of the Map Academic Track proceedings

    Recently the SOTM 2019 Heidelberg Academic Track Proceedings have been published. GIScience Research Group Heidelberg and HeiGIT contributed several talks and posters. Below you can find an overview. Contact us if you are interested in further details on ongoing research. Klonner, Hartmann, Djami, Zipf, A. (2019). “Ohsome” OpenStreetMap Data Evaluation: Fitness of Field Papers for…

  • Learning salience models of indoor landmarks

    In landmark-based way-finding, determining the most salient landmark from several candidates at decision points is challenging. To overcome this problem, current approaches usually rely on a linear model to measure the salience of landmarks. However, linear models are not always able to establish an accurate quantitative relationship between the attributes of a landmark and its…

  • ohsome presentation in Malta at the 3rd International Workshop on Spatial Data Quality

    Around 55 participants gathered in Malta for the 3rd International Workshop on Spatial Data Quality 2020 from 28th to 29th of January. Among national mapping agencies, software providers and standardization organizations, HeiGIT had the opportunity to present its ohsome – OSM history analytics platform for analyzing spatial data quality by looking at the temporal development…