Best Paper 2010

The U.V. Helava Award, sponsored by Elsevier B.V. and Leica Geosystems AG, is a prestigious ISPRS Award, which was established in 1996 to encourage and stimulate submission of high quality scientific papers by individual authors or groups to the ISPRS Journal, to promote and advertise the Journal, and to honour the outstanding contributions of Dr. Uuno V. Helava to research and development in Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

The Award is presented to authors of the best paper, written in English and published exclusively in the ISPRS Journal during the four-year period from January of a Congress year, to December of the year prior to the next Congress. The Award consists of a monetary grant of SFr. 10,000 and a plaque. A five-member jury, comprising experts of high scientific standing, whose expertise covers the main topics included in the scope of the Journal, evaluates the papers. For each year of the four-year evaluation period, the best paper is selected, and among these four papers, the one to receive the U.V. Helava Award.

The fourth U.V. Helava Award will be presented at the 22th ISPRS Congress in Melbourne, 25 August-1 September 2012. The jury appointed by the ISPRS Council evaluated the 54 papers of volume 65 (2010) and announced its decision for the Best Paper. The winner of the 2010 Best Paper Award is:

  "Automatic detection and tracking of pedestrians from a moving stereo rig"

by Konrad Schindler ¹, Andreas Ess², Bastian Leibe³, and Luc Van Gool^2,4

¹ Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
² Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
³ UMIC Research Centre, RWTH Aachen, Germany
⁴ ESAT/PSI–VISICS, IBBT, KU Leuven, Belgium

Konrad Schindler		Andreas Ess		Bastian Leibe		Luc Van Gool

Jury's rationale for the paper selection

The paper reports on joint work on a system to detect and track pedestrians from moving vehicles. It combines close-range photogrammetry of dynamic scenes and automatic image understanding. The topic is highly relevant for ground based navigation systems. The objective, namely to have a real time interpretation system, is challenging. The paper gives insight into the different modules and presents an impressive quantitative evaluation. It is well organized, interesting, and easy to read.

On behalf of the ISPRS and the U.V. Helava Award jury, I would like to congratulate the authors for this distinction and thank them for their contribution. I would also like to thank the sponsors of the Award, and the jury members for their thorough evaluations.

George Vosselman
Editor-in-Chief
ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
University of Twente, Faculty ITC, the Netherlands
E-mail address: vosselman@itc.nl