6th GEOBIA – Solutions & Synergies
During the last 10 years the GEOBIA community has grown from a niche discipline to a recognized and vibrant branch of geoinformation science, and methods developed by the growing community have helped to tackle problems in virtually all domains where geographic data are used. The growing importance of image processing, be it of traditional airborne or satellite data, but also complex hyperspectral data stacks, videos, or image data used by other communities (e.g., bio-medical and pharmaceutical), has resulted in a multitude of methodological approaches. Segmentation-based approaches have turned out to be an excellent way to incorporate process and feature knowledge, in addition to providing an effective way of dealing with multi-scale data. As a consequence hundreds of scientific publications have greatly enriched the geoinformation science domain over the past decade.
GEOBIA 2016 at ITC will focus on two issues where more progress is needed:
Solutions: while GEOBIA has undoubtedly advanced our understanding of a wide range of environmental processes or anthropogenic activities, many studies are marked by great technical complexity, a reliance on proprietary software, and have resulted in methods and procedures that are difficult to replicate and use for non-expert stakeholders. Especially in countries with limited resources and great environmental challenges, GEOBIA to date only plays a minor role in actual problem solving. One focus of the conference will be on this aspect, reflecting ITC’s expertise on advancing geoinformation science and Earth observation in economically less developed countries. One of the planned highlights of GEOBIA 2016 will be a benchmarking effort, connected to an ongoing ISPRS initiative, aimed at stimulating the development of optimized, generic and transferable methods for standard GEOBIA problems.
Synergies: Segmentation-based analysis is not an exclusive GEOBIA domain. On the contrary, such methodological approaches play a vital role in the biomedical and pharmaceutical communities already mentioned, but also feature very strongly in the computer vision domain. Object-based analysis is as critical to the analysis of lidar or image-derived point clouds as to the processing of satellite images. As such those domains have a lot to share with the GEOBIA field, and vice versa. A core effort of GEOBIA 2016 will be to find synergies between the disciplines that share an interest in object-based data processing.
Key dates for paper submission, as well as details on the benchmarking, keynote speakers and other unique aspects of GEOBIA 2016 will be announced on this website shortly. Make sure you register for updates.
Welcome to GEOBIA 2016 in Enschede!
Norman Kerle,
Chair of the organization committee