Best Paper 1999

The U.V. Helava Award, sponsored by Elsevier Science B.V. and LH Systems, LLC, is a prestigious new ISPRS Award, which was established 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 first U.V. Helava Award will be presented at the 19^th ISPRS Congress, Amsterdam, 16-23 July 2000. The five-member jury appointed by the ISPRS Council evaluated the 34 papers of 1999 and announced its decision for the Best Paper. The winner of the 1999 Best Paper is:

  Automated Reconstruction of 3D Models from Real Environments

V. Sequeira ¹ , K. Ng ² , E. Wolfart ¹ , J.G.M. Gonçalves ¹ , D. Hogg ²

1 European Commission - Joint Research Centre, TP 270, I-21020 Ispra (VA), Italy

² School of Computer Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

Jury's rationale for the paper selection

The paper describes an integrated approach for automating the construction of textured 3D scene models of building interiors from laser range data and digital images. The approach has been implemented in a collection of algorithms and sensors within a prototype mobile platform, whose components are presented, together with experimental results. The paper gives a comprehensive overview of all processing steps, is clearly presented, well written and illustrated. The work presented is a combination of various experiences and based on actual practical work, thus, the problems addressed and the presented solutions are relevant. The subject of the paper is on new emerging technologies that continuously gain importance in our scientific fields, with a wide range of applications in visualisation, virtual reality, building facilities management, architecture and others.

In the name 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 hard work and thorough evaluation.

Emmanuel P. Baltsavias

Editor-in-Chief, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing