The U. V. Helava Award 2022 – 2025
The U.V. Helava Award, sponsored by Elsevier B.V. and Leica Geosystems AG, is a prestigious ISPRS Award, which was established in 1998 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 10,000 SFr., certificates and a silver plaque. It is sponsored by Elsevier B.V. and Hexagon Geosystems, while the Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (Prof. Henrik Haggrén), Helsinki University of Technology (the University where Helava studied) paid half the costs for the silver plaque. The plaque was designed with care and enthusiasm by the 1980-88 ISPRS Technical Commission III President, Einari Kilpelä, previously professor at the Helsinki University of Technology.
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 evaluation period, the best paper is selected, and among these four papers, the one to receive the U.V. Helava Award. The award-winning paper for 2022-2025 is:
"Word2Scene: Efficient remote sensing image scene generation with only one word via hybrid intelligence and low-rank representation".
by Jiaxin Ren a,b,c,d, Wanzeng Liu c,d,e,*, Jun Chen a,c,d,*, Shunxi Yin c,d,f and Yuan Tao c,d,f
a Moganshan Geospatial Information Laboratory, Deqing 313200, China
b School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan 410083, China
c National Geomatics Center of China, Beijing 100830, China
d Key Laboratory of Spatio-temporal Information and Intelligent Services, Ministry of Natural Resources of China, Beijing 100830, China
e Hubei Luojia Laboratory, Wuhan, Hubei 430079, China
f School of Environment and Spatial Informatics, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, Jiangsu 221116, China
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Wanzeng Liu |
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Jun Chen |
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Yuan Tao |
published in Volume 218, Part B, December 2024, Pages 231-257,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2024.11.002
Jury's rationale for the paper selection
This paper developed an efficient method, named Word2Scene, for generating remote sensing scenes using hybrid intelligence and low-rank representation, supported by a novel evaluation method. The approach allows to generate realistic looking remote sensing image with strong control over the semantic. This generative capability can be used to understand what is represented by the models but also the deficits. Therefore, it is very deserving of the U.V. Helava Award for 2022-2025.
The eighth U.V. Helava Award will be presented at the 25th ISPRS Congress in Toronto, Canada, 4-11 July 2026 by Lena Halounová, ISPRS President, and representatives of the sponsors.
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.
Qihao Weng, Ph.D., MAE, AAAS/IEEE/AAG/ASPRS/AAIA Fellow
Chair Professor & Global STEM Scholar
Editor-in-Chief
ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
E-mail: qihao.weng@polyu.edu.hk