Category: Research

  • Determination of building inundation depths based on user-generated flood images – new study published

    In our recently published study “Direct local building inundation depth determination in 3-D point clouds from user-generated flood images” we present a new approach for deriving local building inundation depth from ordinary user-generated flood images captured during a flood event. After reconstructing a 3-D scene of the building of interest with close-range photogrammetry (CRP) algorithms,…

  • Adding Landmark based Navigation Instructions to OpenRouteService

    A recently published paper (Rousell & Zipf 2017) presents a prototype navigation service extending OpenRouteService (Schmitz et al. 2008) that extracts landmarks suitable for pedestrian navigation instructions from the OSM dataset based on several metrics. In general, when providing instructions on how to get somewhere, people generally include landmarks in their instructions – “Turn left…

  • Martin Hämmerle receives PhD

    Yesterday, our colleague Dr. Martin Hämmerle defended his PhD thesis with great success. We would like to congratulate him – with our sincere thanks for his hard work and amazing research the last years. Martin is an expert on 3D geodata (with focus on 3D point clouds from LiDAR and photogrammetry), methods for 3D processing…

  • 3D bathymetry measurements in shallow-water environments with a low-cost sensor – study published

    To take bathymetric measurements in areas with shallow water is very challenging for methods such as SONAR or bathymetric LiDAR. In our study “Assessing the Potential of a Low-Cost 3-D Sensor in Shallow-Water Bathymetry”, we examine the performance of a low-cost 3D camera when capturing bathymetry in waters up to 0.4 m depth. The tested…

  • Reducing stress by avoiding noise with ‘Quiet Routing’ in OpenRouteService

    Noise pollution is a growing problem in many urban environments, affecting citizens’ daily life. It can reduce citizens’ happiness, increase their stress, and even people them get sick if they are exposed to noise pollution for a long period of time. In recent studies we investigate the use of crowdsourced data to derive noise polluted…

  • Introducing Healthy Routing preferring Green Areas with OpenRouteService

    Research in psychology and public health shows that there are environmental factors that cause an area to impose more or less stress to a person. One example is that being surrounded by natural green areas (meadows, parks, trees and forests etc. or also blue water areas) has a relaxing influence to the mood of a…

  • Call For Participation for Crowdsourced Damage Assessment Project

    In the aftermath of a disaster, knowing the condition of buildings, infrastructure, and utilities is critical to both immediate response and long-term recovery efforts. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is often asked to help identify damage to buildings and other assets in the affected region. In the past, limitations in post-disaster imagery and difficulties in…

  • MapSwipe Analytics: Map each Swipe and Tap

    Since the launch of the MapSwipe Analytics webpage three month ago we were able to improve our service and offer more detailed information on each project in MapSwipe. MapSwipe is a mobile App for crowdsourcing geographic information needed by humanitarian organisations like Red Cross and Doctors without Borders (MSF) introduced earlier. In particular the data can be used for priorizing areas…

  • Paper on OSMlanduse.org at AGIT

    The programme of the AGIT Symposium 2017 in Salzburg is online now and it includes a first paper about the work at GIScience Heidelberg on OSMlanduse.org. It will be presented 6 July in the afternoon at AGIT Salzburg. The talk is entitled “OSMLanduse Version 1” while the full titel of the paper is: Voß, J.,…

  • Monitoring and Assessing Post-Disaster Tourism Recovery Using Geotagged Social Media Data

    Tourism is a economically highly important industry. It is, however, vulnerable to disaster events. Geotagged social media data, as one of the forms of volunteered geographic information (VGI), has been widely explored to support the prevention, preparation, and response phases of disaster management, while little effort has been put on the recovery phase. A recently…

  • GIScience support for Crowdsourced Damage Assessment project at Stanford University

    In the aftermath of natural disasters an assessment of the impact and damage in the affected area is crucial to enable coordination of response and recovery. While the disaster preparedness and response activations by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in regard to infrastructure mapping have already proven great potential in various disaster events, due to a…

  • Wisdom of the Crowd from LBSN: PhD Defence of Ming Li

    Last Thursday our GIScience HD team member Ming Li successfully defended her PhD. The thesis is entitled “Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd from Location-based Social Networks: Theoretical Potentials and Practical Applications”. Thanks to the technical advancements, the mobile users all over the world are collaborating in the location-based social networks (LBSNs) to create a…