ISPRS Technical Commission II — Theory and Concepts of Spatio - Temporal Data Handling and Information

The organization of ISPRS Technical Commission I is described in this Highlights issue. Seven Working Groups belong to Commission I and two are shared with Commission V. Each Working Group has already proposed activities which now should be realized within the next four year period until the Beijing Congress. An overview and the foreseen activities of each Working Group are described below. For the next 4 years, TC1/WG1 aims at contributing to the strengthening of the cooperation between the different entities involved in the fields of calibration and validation including the end-users. The activities of the ISPRS/CEOS Cal/Val Task Force should be continued under a new leadership. A workshop held by CEOS in Noordwijk in October 2004 on intercomparison of large scale optical and infrared sensors pointed out the necessity of satellite instrument intercalibration. Intercalibration of large field of view image sensor is proving to be a positive outcome of test sites sharing. Such sites sharing should be promoted as well for geometric calibration of remote sensing systems. Also it is expected to see a significant increase in the number of applications based on the multi-sensor data-fusion techniques. In the same time, more and more systems both scientific and commercial propose value added products (geometrically referenced, mosaics, spectral bands combinations, optical properties and temperature at ground level, ...) to end-users. Therefore it is becoming especially critical to enhance users ability to understand and evaluate sensor performance and data quality in a uniform manner across all sensor and data of interest. In that regards, TC1/WG1 will strongly promote and encourage all efforts towards standardized definitions of the calibration parameters and a consistent classification of the calibration and validation methods as well as ground truth data sets and test sites. WG I/2 SAR and LIDAR Systems Active sensor-based SAR and LiDAR technology, introduced in the late 90s, has received wide acceptance in airborne surveying as a leading tool for obtaining high-quality surface data in an unprecedentedly short turnaround time. The adoption of the new technology was fairly smooth and quick, primarily due to the high-level of automation of the data processing. With an increasing number of systems sold, vendors have been able to refine the technology rather quickly, delivering a continuously improving performance, measured in terms of number of points. LiDAR systems nowadays do range measurement with an increasing number of points per surface, count multiple returns per single shot, deliver reflectance …