Current page: Members->List of Members->Wolfgang Foerstner
 

Wolfgang Foerstner
University of Bonn
Membership Number: 2
Address: Institut fuer Photogrammetrie,Universitaet Bonn, Nussallee 15,D 53115 Bonn, Germany.
Email: wf@ipb.uni-bonn.de
Phone:
Fax: +49 228 73-2712
URL: http://www.ipb.uni-bonn.de

Biographical Sketch
Wolfgang Förstner was born in 1946. Since 1990 he is a full professor of photogrammetry and the director of the Institute for Photogrammetry at the University of Bonn. He received his diploma and Ph.D from Stuttgart University, Germany in 1971 and 1976. After secondary education, 1971-1974, and work at the Survey Department Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dept. for Automation,1974-1977, he was Research Assistant at the Institute for Photogrammetry at Stuttgart University from 1977-1989.

He is responsible for the education in photogrammetry, image understanding, remote sensing and GIS of students in surveying engineering and for those students from computer science, who take photogrammetry and image understanding as second subject. The lectures include introductory and basic courses (40 students per year) and advanced courses (5-15 students per year). Since 1996 he has supervised 15 Ph.D students and 18 Diplom theses.

He co-authored three papers which received the DAGM-Award (Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Musterekennung) in 1989, 1998 and 2000, and also in 2000, he received the "Gino Cassinis" award, sponsored by the Italian Society of Topography and Photogrammetry (SIFET), for his contribution to the enhancement of mathematical and statistical foundation of Photogrammetry.

University of Bonn (Institute for Photogrammetry)
The Institute for Photogrammetry at Bonn University is doing research in computational vision and digital photogrammetry. The group, which is active in this field since 1990, currently has 10 researchers and graduate students. 12 PhD thesis came out of the group in the last 5 years.

The main topic since nearly 10 years is automatic image interpretation, especially automatic building extraction from single and multiple images. The goal is to develop models which on one hand are generic enough to cover a large range of real buildings and on the other hand specific enough to allow automatic analysis. Two aspects have been in focus: (1) semantic models for interpreting aerial images are a key in reaching the required level of abstraction and to generate results which can be used in geoinformation systems; here, in cooperation with the Computer Science Department generic models of buildings on the basis of CSG-models have been developed and successfully applied; (2) The integration of geometry and statistics appears to be the key for consistent geometric reasoning when reconstructing polyhedral type objects from images. We are currently building a toolbox for statistically uncertain geometric reasoning (SUGR) which helps us in grouping in 2D and 3D. Moreover we investigate Markoff-random fields and Bayesian networks for modelling reasoning under uncertainty.

Our future work is directed towards integrating semantics, geometry and statistics into one system. Here the aspect of control of vision algorithms and the interface with human operators will play a central role. The work on performance characteristics of vision algorithms and on semiautomatic building extraction is a first step into this direction of automatic interpretation of aerial images.


Site generated on Friday, 06 January 2006