"Optical 3-D Measurement Techniques" and "3D Virtual Reconstruction and Visualization of Complex Architectures" from 9th until 13th July

By Dipl.-Ing. Axel Wendt, Robert Bosch GmbH

The 8th conference on "Optical 3-D Measurement Techniques" (Optical 3-D) took place from 9th until 12th July 2007 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland. The conference was organized by Prof. Armin Gruen, the Head of the Chair of Photogrammetry at the Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry (ETH Zurich) and Prof. Heribert Kahmen, the Head of the Chair of Engineering Geodesy at the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics (Vienna University of Technology) and was sponsored by the organisations ISPRS, IAG and FIG. This was the 8th conference in a row. The first seven conferences were held alternately in Vienna and Zurich.

The conference intended to review the latest developments in different technologies, algorithms, processing techniques, systems, hard- and software, to identify the major problem areas and to discuss the direction of future research and development in order to further advance the technology. Thus, topics are presented in the range from high resolution satellite data, digital aerial cameras to industrial stripe projection systems and forensic applications and emphasized the high correlation of approaches and upcoming problems between the different research topics.

The conference featured 101 papers presented in 18 technical sessions and 2 poster sessions. The 18 technical sessions included 4 plenary sessions as single-track covering the field of Range Imaging, Digital airborne large-format cameras, Terrestrial laser scanning and Body modelling and crime scene investigations. The other sessions were organized as double-track including a special session on Digital Photogrammetry in Russia. In all 173 attendances from 35 countries visited the conference. The proceedings are available in hard copy via the Chair of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, ISBN 3-906467-67-8. The social highlight of the conference was the excursion to the "Rheinfall" including a dinner at castle "Schloss Laufen".

The conference was opened by the keynote speech of Prof. Roland Siegwart through his invited talk about "UAV's - status and expectations" referring about pilotless aircrafts and in particular about the miniaturization of this technology of "micro-UAV's". During the conference the participants got the possibility to form their view in a demonstration about the suitability of an UVA for surveying purposes. Two sessions were about the topic Range Imaging. The organizers successfully invited several leading manufacturer to demonstrate and present the state of art of range imaging technologies. The authors in these both sessions gave an overview about recent developments, fields of application and the potential of this technology. For many close range applications the accuracy is still not sufficient. Range imaging technology dominates in applications for car safety systems, security systems and multimedia e.g. user interfaces for gaming applications.

From all interesting presentations of the conference some of them should be emphasize. E.g. U. Tempelmann reports over recent hardware improvements of the ADS40 and the new camera model including calibration procedures. K. Mechelke explained the accuracy behaviours of the newest generation of terrestrial laser scanner with extensive procedures and gave a comparison of devices from different manufactures. B. Leibe presented image based modelling approaches to generate 3-D city models with camera data of moving vehicles supporting car navigation systems.

Applications and technology for the preservation and documentation of cultural heritages were presented on the workshop "3D Virtual Reconstruction and Visualization of Complex Architectures" (3D-Arch), which took place from 12th until 13th July at the same conference venue. Due to the strong correlation between the conference and this workshop a common session was hold. The workshop 3D-Arch was organized from the ISPRS working group V/4 with Sabry El-Hakim (NRC, Ottawa, Canada), Fabio Remondino (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) and Jan Böhm (University of Stuttgart, Germany) and the working group V/2 with Pierre Grussenmeyer (INSA, Straßburg, France), Klaus Hanke (University of Innsbruck, Austria) and Lorenzo Gonzo (ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy) and took place the second time since 2005.

The workshop gave a good impression about the currently best available technology for 3-D modelling and recording of architectural sites through image based approaches as well as with laser scanning. In 7 technical sessions and 1 poster session 30 papers were presented covering the field of 3-D modelling, visualisation, documentation and multi sensor integration to name a few. In all 68 attendances visited the workshop. The proceedings are available online via http://www.commission5.isprs.org/3darch07.

In the opening keynote note speech L. Borgeat talked in his invited presentation about the visualizing and analyzing of large 3D datasets. In a software demonstration, he showed the potential of modern visualizing systems, which could still handle and interact large datasets due to automatic level-of-detail technology. M. Pollefeys introduced the projects of his group about real-time reconstruction of city models from video image sequences. His presentation summarized the current state of the art in the field of Computer Vision with the focus on real-time applications and fully automation and less on the accuracy. In contrary S. Linsinger presented the results of his project of the reconstruction of the Cuvillies-theater in Munich, Germany. The impressive dense point cloud and achieved degree of detail based on 10-month data recording with laser scanner and stripe projection system as well as intensive manually post-processing. The report of this practical application was the direct opposite to the fully automatic approaches in Computer Vision and documented the balance of this workshop between research and applications.