Best Paper for the period 2022-2025

The ISPRS Fritz Ackermann Award was established in 2022 to encourage and stimulate submission of high quality scientific papers by individual authors or groups to the ISPRS Open Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, to promote and advertise the Journal, and to honour the outstanding contributions of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Friedrich (Fritz) Ackermann to research and development in photogrammetry and remote sensing. The Award is presented to authors of the best paper published exclusively in the ISPRS Open Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing during the four-year period from January of a Congress year to December of the year prior to the next Congress. As an exception, the period for the first Award will cover the five-year period starting in 2021. The Award consists of a certificate and a grant of €10,000. It is sponsored by Elsevier B.V. and Trimble, Inc..

A five-member Jury, comprising experts of high scientific standing, whose expertise covers the main topics included in the scope of the Journal, evaluated 102 papers for the period 2021-2025. For each year of the evaluation period, the Best Paper was selected and has been announced in the ISPRS eBulletin, and on the websites of ISPRS and Elsevier. From these five papers, the one to receive the first ISPRS Fritz Ackermann Award was selected.

The award-winning paper is

"Airborne sensor fusion: Expected accuracy and behavior of a concurrent adjustment"

by Kyriaki Mouzakidou¹, Aurélien Brun¹, Davide Antonio Cucci², and Jan Skaloud¹

¹Earth Sensing & Observation Laboratory (ESO), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Station 18, Lausanne 1010, Switzerland
²Pix4D SA, Route de Renens 24, Prilly 1008, Switzerland

Kyriaki Mouzakidou		Aurélien Brun		Davide Antonio Cucci		Jan Skaloud

published in volume 12, April 2024,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ophoto.2023.100057

Jury's rationale for the paper selection

In their article, the authors address the highly relevant problem of photogrammetry with consumer-grade drones and navigation sensors. More in detail, the authors thoroughly investigate tightly coupled sensor orientation with spatial constraints in a common adjustment. The results show significant improvement in the attitude accuracy of the derived trajectory while reducing the dispersion of geo-referencing errors. Boresight estimation can be stabilized by using image constraints. The ablation study demonstrates the influence of different types of spatial constraints and flight geometries. The work potentially speaks to quite a large audience, while still being non-trivial.

The ISPRS Fritz Ackermann Award will be presented at one of the plenary sessions of the 25th ISPRS Congress in Toronto by Lena Halounova, ISPRS President, and representatives of the sponsors.

On behalf of the ISPRS and the ISPRS Fritz Ackermann 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 especially the jury members for their thorough evaluations of all papers published in the last five years.

George Vosselman
past Editor-in-Chief 
ISPRS Open Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
ITC, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands
Email address: george.vosselman@utwente.nl