The winners for the 1996-1999 period

The first U.V. Helava Award, a new, prestigious ISPRS award, was presented at the Opening Session of the 19^th ISPRS Congress on July 17^th in Amsterdam, by Lawrence W. Fritz, ISPRS President and Bruce Wald, President and CEO, LH Systems. The winners received a monetary grant of 10,000 SFr., certificates and a silver plaque. The plaque was designed with care and lots or personal unselfish work by the 1980-88 Technical Commission III President, Einari Kilpelä, while the Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (Prof. H. Haggrén), Helsinki University of Technology (the University where Helava studied) paid half the costs for the plaque for this and the next 5 awards.

The U.V. Helava Award, sponsored by Elsevier Science B.V. and LH Systems, LLC, 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 recipients of the Award may receive it only once.

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 jury evaluated 119 papers for the period 1996-1999 and selected the Best Paper of each year, which have been already published in the ISPRS Journal, Highlights and on the WEB. The awards for the 3 runner-up papers were presented at the General Assembly of the ISPRS Congress. A second five-member jury selected among these four Best Papers the best for the 1996-1999 period. The winner is the paper

  3D City Models for CAAD-Supported Analysis and Design of Urban Areas

Martina Sinning-Meister, Armin Gruen, Hanbin Dan

published in 1996.

The jury's rationale for the paper selection was:

This paper is well written and presented and provides a very readable account of an interesting, interdisciplinary topic, namely that of 3D building extraction from images for city modelling. It was one of the first examples of 3D city model generation and visualisation. Although developments have moved on since 1996, judged on its status then, it is innovative and constitutes a significant development in this field. Furthermore, the authors represent a group (Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, ETH Zurich) that published additional good papers on this topic in the PRS over the past 4 years and that is responsible for major developments in 3D city modelling through scientific but also practical contributions, like the development of related operational software systems and their use in various applications.

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 hard work and thorough evaluation.

Emmanuel P. Baltsavias
Editor-in-Chief, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing

The winners of the U.V. Helava Award at the Opening Session of the 19^th ISPRS Congress. From left to right:
Martina Sinning-Meister, Armin Gruen and Hanbin Dan.

Presentation of the U.V. Helava Award at the Opening Session of the 19^th ISPRS Congress. From left to right: Lawrence W. Fritz, ISPRS President, Bruce Wald, President and CEO of LH Systems and the winners Martina Sinning-Meister, Armin Gruen and Hanbin Dan.

The silver plaque designed by Einari Kilpelä, Finland.