Best Paper 2006

The U.V. Helava Award, sponsored by Elsevier B.V. and Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping, LLC 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 fouryear 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 third U.V. Helava Award will be presented at the 21th ISPRS Congress, Beijing, 3-11 July 2008. The fivemember jury appointed by the ISPRS Councilevaluated the 30 papers of Vol. 61 (2006) and announced its decision for the Best Paper. The winner of the 2006 Best Paper is:

  Range determination with waveform recording laser systems using a Wiener Filter

by Boris Jutzi¹ and Uwe Stilla²

(1) FGAN-FOM Research Institute for Optronics and Pattern Recognition, 76275 Ettlingen, Germany
(2) Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Technical University Munich, 80290 Munich, Germany

Boris Jutzi		Uwe Stilla

Jury's rationale for the paper selection

The article presents fundamental research on the new technology of full waveform laser scanning systems. It collects the necessary physical and signal theoretic tools for a deep and complete analysis. The suggested approximation with the Wiener filter for recovering the surface response appears to be useful. The practical relevance is also high, as it deals with the signal behaviour of the wavelength laser scanner and its interaction with multi range surfaces. The research work which is here presented seems to be also generic without being limited to scanners only. The paper is also clear in presentation, and the experiment is very descriptive.

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
ITC, Enschede, the Netherlands