3D Geospatial Data Processing Group

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 [...]

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 in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, on [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 difficult [...]