(20-July, 2012) 2012 Data Fusion Contest: winners announcement

Dear Members,

on Behalf of the IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Technical Committee, it is our pleasure to announce the winners of the 2012 IEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest:

1. C. Berger, M. Voltersen, R. Eckardt, J. Eberle, T. Heyer, N. Salepci, S. Hese, and C. Schmullius, from the University of Jena, Germany, with a paper entitled “FUSION OF HIGH-RESOLUTION OPTICAL IMAGERY AND OBJECT HEIGHT INFORMATION FOR AN INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT OF URBAN DENSITY (UD)”

2. J. Tao1, Stefan Auer2, Richard Bamler1, from (1) German Aerospace Center (DLR), (2) Technische Universität München, Germany, with a paper entitled “COMBINATION OF LIDAR AND SAR DATA WITH SIMULATION TECHNIQUES FOR IMAGE INTERPRETATION AND CHANGE DETECTION”

3. K. Ewald1, M. Gartley2, J. Jacobson3, and A. Buswell1, from (1) Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., (2) Rochester Institute of Technology, (3) National Air and Space Intelligence Center, United States, with a paper entitled “RADIOSITY TECHNIQUE FOR REFLECTANCE RETRIEVAL APPLIED TO WORLDVIEW-2 DATA”

Congratulations to the winners whose papers were judged to be superior in terms of sound scientific reasoning, problem definition, methodology, validation, and presentation!!!

The winning teams will be awarded with an IEEE Certificate of Appreciation in Munich (Germany) during the 2012 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. Additionally, this year the Data Fusion Technical Committee is pleased to offer a monetary prize to the winning teams as follows:
• First Prize: $800
• Second Prize: $500
• Third Prize: $300

As tradition, a manuscript summarizing the Contest outcomes will be submitted to a GRSS Journal for peer-review. To further enhance its impact in the community, the Data Fusion Technical Committee will support its open-access publication cost.

More than 1150 researchers across the globe registered to the Contest, corresponding to an increment of more than 51% with respect to the previous year. This demonstrates the great interest from the Earth observation scientific research and application community. The dataset was downloaded from 78 different countries, with a large number from less developed areas.