Best Paper 2024

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 of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 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 will be selected. The seventh U.V. Helava Award will be presented at the 25th ISPRS Congress in 2026.

The Jury, appointed by the ISPRS Council, evaluated papers from Volumes 207-218 (2024) and announces its decision for the Best Paper. The winner of the 2024 Best Paper 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, Wanzeng Liu ^b,c,d,*, Jun Chen ^b,c,f,*, Shunxi Yin ^b,c,e and Yuan Tao ^b,c,e

^a School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan 410083, China
^b National Geomatics Center of China, Beijing 100830, China
^c Key Laboratory of Spatio-temporal Information and Intelligent Services, Ministry of Natural Resources of China, Beijing 100830, China
^d Hubei Luojia Laboratory, Wuhan, Hubei 430079, China
^e School of Environment and Spatial Informatics, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, Jiangsu 221116, China
^f Moganshan Geospatial Information Laboratory, Deqing 313200, China

Jiaxin Ren		Wanzeng Liu		Jun Chen
Shunxi Yin				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 very well deserves the Best Paper award for 2024.

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