Best Paper 2001

The U.V. Helava Award, sponsored by Elsevier Science B.V. and LH Systems, LLC, is a prestigious new ISPRS Award, which was established 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 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 second U.V. Helava Award will be presented at the 20th ISPRS Congress, Istanbul, 12-23 July 2004. The five-member jury appointed by the ISPRS Council evaluated the 29 papers of Vol. 56 (2001) and announced its decision for the Best Paper.
The winner of the 2001 Best Paper is:

  Seamline detection in colour orthoimage mosaicking by use of twin snakes

Martin Kerschner

Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Vienna University of Technology, Gusshausstrasse 27-29, A-1040 Vienna, Austria

Jury's rationale for the paper selection

The paper describes an interesting and original application of combining color and texture similarity criteria with an advanced active contour concept (twin snakes) for fully automated detection of optimal seamlines in the creation of orthoimage mosaics. In spite of weaknesses in the quality evaluation of the method and quantitative validation of the results, the paper gives a good overview of possible mosaicking problems, while the approach is well presented and aims at improved automation in a task of practical relevance and increased demand, namely orthoimage production.

In the name 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.