Sander Oude Elberink

• Dr. ir.
• Professor (Associate) at University of Twente

This review is aimed at exploring the use of remote sensing technology with a focus on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in monitoring and management of palm pests and diseases with a special focus on date palms. It highlights the most common sensor types, ranging from passive sensors such as RGB, multispectral, hyperspectral, and thermal as well as...

Changes are taking place in mountain regions due to global warming, drought, heavy precipitation and intensive land use. Research into changes on a detailed scale is possible thanks to the development of automated near and remote sensing techniques. However, data acquisition, validation and analysis are a major challenge in these areas. The 5th edi...

The incorporation of detailed textures in 3D city models is crucial for enhancing their realism, as it adds depth and authenticity to the visual representation, thereby closely mimicking the surfaces and materials found in actual urban environments. Existing 3D city models can be enriched with energy-related roof and façade details, such as the mat...

Geometric errors in LoD2 building models can be caused by the modeling algorithm but are often related to the quality of input data. One approach to tackling the modeling errors caused by the quality of input data is to collect additional data with a UAV and remodel the buildings. However, no flight planning approach exists specifically designed fo...

Asset management systems are beneficial for maintaining building infrastructure and can be used to keep up-to-date records of relevant safety assets, such as smoke detectors, exit signs, and fire extinguishers. Existing methods for locating and identifying these assets in buildings primarily rely on surveys and images, which only provide 2D locatio...

The international summer school Sensing Mountains, which was held for the first time in 2015 in Obergurgl (Austria), is a biannual event for early career scientists bringing together international researchers from Geosciences, Biosciences and Engineering for mapping and analysing of geospatial data in mountain environments. The summer school takes...

To reduce the cost of manually annotating training data for supervised classifiers, we propose an automated approach to extract training data of urban objects in six classes: buildings, fences, man-made poles, vegetation, vehicles, and low objects. In this study, two segmentation algorithms are firstly implemented to generate meaningful objects fro...

Semantic segmentation has recently emerged as a prominent area of interest in Earth Observation. Several semantic segmentation datasets already exist, facilitating comparisons among different methods in complex urban scenes. However, most open high-resolution urban datasets are geographically skewed towards Europe and North America, while coverage...

Favelas are the most common type of informal settlements found in Brazil. The Housing Secretariat, City Hall, Sao Paulo, has conducted surveys using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for the favelas to facilitate the slum upgrading projects and has taken the initiative to create a digital twin of the slum areas. This study illustrates the feasibility...

In this paper, we present an improved framework for the instance-aware semantic segmentation of road furniture in mobile laser scanning data. In our framework, we first detect road furniture from mobile laser scanning point clouds. Then we decompose the detected pieces of road furniture into poles and their attached components, and extract the inst...

Sensing mountains by close-range and remote techniques is a challenging task. The 4th edition of the international Innsbruck Summer School of Alpine Research 2022 – Close-range Sensing Techniques in Alpine Terrain brings together early career and experienced scientists from technical-, geo- and environmental-related research fields. The interdiscip...

Digital twins (DTs) have been found useful in manufacturing, construction, and maintenance. Adapting DTs to serve cities, the question arises of what an urban digital twin should contain and how it should be orchestrated to serve a city’s dynamical ecosystem, along with how to enhance the efficiency of the city. We are aligning with the commonplace...

The use of Airborne Laser Scanner (ALS) point clouds has dominated 3D buildings reconstruction research, thus giving photogrammetric point clouds less attention. Point cloud density, occlusion and vegetation cover are some of the concerns that promote the necessity to understand and question the completeness and correctness of UAV photogrammetric p...

The performance of deep learning models in semantic segmentation is dependent on the availability of a large amount of labeled data. However, the influence of label noise, in the form of incorrect annotations, on the performance is significant and mostly ignored. This is a big concern in remote sensing applications, wherein acquired datasets are sp...

In the past decade, a lot of effort is put into applying digital innovations to building life cycles. 3D Models have been proven to be efficient for decision making, scenario simulation and 3D data analysis during this life cycle. Creating such digital representation of a building can be a labour-intensive task, depending on the desired scale and l...

3D tree objects can be used in various applications, like estimation of physiological equivalent temperature (PET). During this project, a method is designed to extract 3D tree objects from a country-wide point cloud. To apply this method on large scale, the algorithm needs to be efficient. Extraction of trees is done in two steps: point-wise class...

Multipath effects and signal obstruction by buildings in urban canyons can lead to inaccurate GNSS measurements and therefore errors in the estimated trajectory of Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems; consequently, derived point clouds are distorted and lose spatial consistency. We obtain decimetre-level trajectory accuracy making use of correspond...

Satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) techniques have been successfully applied for structural health monitoring of line-infrastructure such as railway. Limited by meter-level spatial resolution of Sentinel-1 satellite radar (SAR) imagery and meter-level geolocation precision, it is still challenging to (1) categorize radar scatterers (e.g., persi...

The 3rd edition of the international summer school “Close-range Sensing Techniques in Alpine terrain” took place in Obergurgl, Austria, in June 2019. This article reports on results from the training and seminar activities and the outcome of student questionnaire survey. Comparison between the recent edition and the past edition in 2017 shows no si...

Precise and accurate three-dimensional geospatial data has become increasingly available thanks to advances in both Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) and Structure-from-Motion Photogrammetry (SfM). These tools provide valuable information for mapping geomorphological features and detect surface changes in mountainous environments. The exploitation o...

The classification of Mobile Laser Scanner (MLS) data is challenging due to the combination of high variation in point density with a high variation of object appearances. The way how objects appear in the MLS data highly depends on the speed and orientation of the mobile mapping platform and the occlusion by other vehicles. There have been many ap...

The labeling of point clouds is the fundamental task in airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds processing. Many supervised methods have been proposed for the point clouds classification work. Training samples play an important role in the supervised classification. Most of the training samples are generated by manual labeling, which is time-con...

3D Cadastre models capture both the complex interrelations between physical objects and their corresponding legal rights, restrictions, and responsibilities. Most of the ongoing research on 3D Cadastre worldwide is focused on interrelations at the level of buildings and infrastructures. So far, the analysis of such interrelations in terms of indoor...

Road furniture recognition has become a prevalent issue in the past few years because of its great importance in smart cities and autonomous driving. Previous research has especially focussed on pole-like road furniture, such as traffic signs and lamp posts. Published methods have mainly classified road furniture as individual objects. However, mos...

Poor GNSS measurements in urban areas caused by blocked GNSS signals and multi-path is a well-known problem, which leads to an inaccurate trajectory estimation of Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) platforms. Consequently, the MLS point cloud contains positioning errors. This paper presents a new method for the automatic extraction of accurate 3D tie poin...

Three-dimensional (3D) building model is gaining more scientific attention in recent times due to its application in various fields such as vehicle autonomous navigation, urban planning, heritage building documentation, gaming visualisation and tourism. The quality of the Level of Detail (LoD) of building models relies on the high-resolution data s...

The ISPRS Geospatial Week 2019 is a combination of 13 workshops organised by 30 ISPRS Working Groups active in areas of interest of ISPRS. The Geospatial Week 2019 is held from 10–14 June 2019, and is convened by the University of Twente acting as local organiser. The Geospatial Week 2019 is the fourth edition, after Antalya Turkey in 2013, La Gran...

The ISPRS Geospatial Week 2019 is a combination of 13 workshops organised by 30 ISPRS Working Groups active in areas of interest of ISPRS. The Geospatial Week 2019 is held from 10–14 June 2019, and is convened by the University of Twente acting as local organiser. The Geospatial Week 2019 is the fourth edition, after Antalya Turkey in 2013, La Gran...

State-of-the-art indoor mobile laser scanners are now lightweight and portable enough to be carried by humans. They allow the user to map challenging environments such as multi-story buildings and staircases while continuously walking through the building. The trajectory of the laser scanner is usually discarded in the analysis, although it gives i...

The data acquisition with Indoor Mobile Laser Scanners (IMLS) is quick, low-cost and accurate for indoor 3D modeling. Besides a point cloud, an IMLS also provides the trajectory of the mobile scanner. We analyze this trajectory jointly with the point cloud to support the labeling of noisy, highly reflected and cluttered points in indoor scenes. An...

Various classification methods have been developed to extract meaningful information from Airborne Laser Scanner (ALS) point clouds. However, the accuracy and the computational efficiency of the existing methods need to be improved, especially for the analysis of large datasets (e.g., at regional or national levels). In this paper, we present a nov...

In this paper, a method is presented to improve the MLS platform’s trajectory for GNSS denied areas. The method comprises two major steps. The first step is based on a 2D image registration technique described in our previous publication. Internally, this registration technique first performs aerial to aerial image matching, this issues corresponde...

Recently in The Netherlands, there are many examples of changes in the functionalities of buildings over time. Tracking these changes could be challenging when the building geometry will change as well; for example a change from administrative to residential use of the space, or merging two spaces in the building without updating the functionality....

Indoor space subdivision is an important aspect of scene analysis that provides essential information for many applications, such as indoor navigation and evacuation route planning. Until now, most proposed scene understanding algorithms have been based on whole point clouds, which has led to complicated operations, high computational loads and low...

Pole-like road furniture detection received much attention due to its traffic functionality in recent years. In this paper, we develop a framework to detect pole-like road furniture from sparse mobile laser scanning data. The framework is carried out in four steps. The unorganised point cloud is first partitioned. Then above ground points are clust...

Deep Learning has been massively used for image classification in recent years. The use of deep learning for ground classification from LIDAR point clouds has also been recently studied. However, point clouds need to be converted into an image in order to use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In state-of-the-art techniques, this conversion is s...

The 2nd international summer school “Close-range sensing techniques in Alpine terrain” was held in July 2017 in Obergurgl, Austria. Participants were trained in selected close-range sensing methods, such as photogrammetry, laser scanning and thermography. The program included keynotes, lectures and hands-on assignments combining field project plann...

Road furniture plays an important role in road safety. To enhance road safety, policies that encourage the road furniture inventory are prevalent in many countries. Such an inventory can be remarkably facilitated by the automatic recognition of road furniture. Current studies typically detect and classify road furniture as one single above-ground c...

Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is often used to monitor landslides and other gravitational mass movements with high levels of geometric detail and accuracy. However, unstructured TLS point clouds lack semantic information, which is required to geomorphologically interpret the measured changes. Extracting meaningful objects in a complex and dynami...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to obtain high-resolution aerial imagery at frequent intervals, making them a valuable tool for urban planners who require up-to-date basemaps. Supervised classification methods can be exploited to translate the UAV data into such basemaps. However, these methods require labeled training samples, t...

The use of Indoor Mobile Laser Scanners (IMLS) for data collection in indoor environments has been increasing in the recent years. These systems, unlike Terrestrial Laser Scanners (TLS), collect data along a trajectory instead of at discrete scanner positions. In this research, we propose several methods to exploit the trajectories of IMLS systems...

A two-step vehicle recognition method from an aerial Lidar point cloud is proposed in this paper. First, the Lidar point cloud is segmented using the region-growing algorithm with vehicle size limitation. Then the vehicle is recognized according to the profile shape based on dynamic time warping. The proposed method can detect vehicles parking unde...

The use of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) to study agricultural crop traits is becoming popular. Wheat plant traits such as crop height, biomass fractions and plant population are of interest to agronomists and biologists for the assessment of a genotype's performance in the environment. Among these performance indicators, plant population in...

Road furniture semantic labelling is vital for large scale mapping and autonomous driving systems. Much research has been investigated on road furniture interpretation in both 2D images and 3D point clouds. Precise interpretation of road furniture in mobile laser scanning data still remains unexplored. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to i...

The increased reliance on geospatial data for decision-making in urban planning makes it imperative that the available spatial information is up-to-date and faithfully represents reality. This calls for map updating methods which support the integration of data from different sources in an automated manner. In this paper, we utilize existing basema...

This study develops an integrated data-driven and model-driven approach (template matching) that clusters the urban railroad point clouds into three classes of rail track, contact cable, and catenary cable. The employed dataset covers 630 m of the Dutch urban railroad corridors in which there are four rail tracks, two contact cables, and two catena...

Nowadays due to the increasing complex and multifunctional building environment in the urban areas it is required an accurate geometry and proper legal registration of the cadastral objects including third dimension and time aspect. 2D land-parcel data seems insufficient to address the variety of problems in high density residential areas. This fac...

Shallow landslides are gravitational mass movements of unconsolidated material on hillslopes with a maximum depth of about two meters. These dynamic processes are usually triggered by hydro-meteorological events, such as heavy rainfall events or rapid snowmelt. Shallow landslides affect infrastructure, cause a loss of soil and degrade agricultural...

This document provides all results mentioned in the associated ISPRS publication. The experiment mentioned in the ISPRS publication is based on the 14 image tiles (from aerial imagery and MLSPC). Here, keypoint detection and matching results of all 14 tiles are provided respectively. All results are provided as vector graphics for better visualizat...

Terrestrial photogrammetry nowadays offers a reasonably cheap, intuitive and effective approach to 3D-modelling. However, the important choice, which sensor and which software to use is not straight forward and needs consideration as the choice will have effects on the resulting 3D point cloud and its derivatives. We compare five different sensors...

Terrestrial photogrammetry nowadays offers a reasonably cheap, intuitive and effective approach to 3D-modelling. However, the important choice, which sensor and which software to use is not straight forward and needs consideration as the choice will have effects on the resulting 3D point cloud and its derivatives. We compare five different sensor...

Early career researchers such as PhD students are a main driving force of scientific research and are for a large part responsible for research innovation. They work on specialized topics within focused research groups that have a limited number of members, but might also have limited capacity in terms of lab equipment. This poses a serious challen...

Early career researchers such as PhD students are a main driving force of scientific research and are for a large part responsible for research innovation. They work on specialized topics within focused research groups that have a limited number of members, but might also have limited capacity in terms of lab equipment. This poses a serious challen...

Nowadays many cities and countries are creating their 3D building models for a better daily management and smarter decision making. The newly created 3D models are required to be consistent with existing 2D footprint maps. Thereby the 2D maps are usually combined with height data for the task of 3D reconstruction. Many buildings are often composed...

In mobile laser scanning systems, the platform’s position is measured by GNSS and IMU, which is often not reliable in urban areas. Consequently, derived Mobile Laser Scanning Point Cloud (MLSPC) lacks expected positioning reliability and accuracy. Many of the current solutions are either semi-automatic or unable to achieve pixel level accuracy. We...

Automatic semantic interpretation of street furniture has become a popular topic in recent years. Current studies detect street furniture as connected components of points above the street level. Street furniture classification based on properties of such components suffers from large intra class variability of shapes and cannot deal with mixed cla...

Nowadays many cities and countries are creating their 3D building models for a better daily management and smarter decision making. The newly created 3D models are required to be consistent with existing 2D footprint maps. Thereby the 2D maps are usually combined with height data for the task of 3D reconstruction. Many buildings are often composed...

Automatic semantic interpretation of street furniture has become a popular topic in recent years. Current studies detect street furniture as connected components of points above the street level. Street furniture classification based on properties of such components suffers from large intra class variability of shapes and cannot deal with mixed cla...

In mobile laser scanning systems, the platform’s position is measured by GNSS and IMU, which is often not reliable in urban areas. Consequently, derived Mobile Laser Scanning Point Cloud (MLSPC) lacks expected positioning reliability and accuracy. Many of the current solutions are either semi-automatic or unable to achieve pixel level accuracy. We...

Lidar (light detection and ranging) provides a promising way of detecting changes of trees in 3D because laser beams can penetrate through the foliage and therefore provide full coverage of trees. The aim is to detect changes in trees in urban areas using multi-temporal airborne lidar point clouds. Three datasets covering a part of Rotterdam, the N...

Mobile Mapping (MM) is a technique to obtain geo-information using sensors mounted on a mobile platform or vehicle. The mobile platform’s position is provided by the integration of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and Inertial Navigation Systems (INS). However, especially in urban areas, building structures can obstruct a direct line-of-s...

The difficulty associated with the Lidar data change detection method is lack of data, which is mainly caused by occlusion or pulse absorption by the surface material, e.g., water. To address this challenge, we present a new strategy for detecting buildings that are “changed”, “unchanged”, or “unknown”, and quantifying the changes. The designation...

The European FP7 project IQmulus yearly organizes several processing contests, where submissions are requested for novel algorithms for point cloud and other big geodata processing. This paper describes the set-up and execution of a contest having the purpose to evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms for Mobile Mapping System point clouds, in order t...

In this paper, we describe the automatic extraction of centerlines of railroads. Mobile Laser Scanning systems are able to capture the 3D environment of the rail tracks with a high level of detail. Our approach first detects laser points that were reflected by the rail tracks, by making use of local properties such as parallelism and height in rela...

3D building models, being the main part of a digital city scene, are essential to all applications related to human activities in urban environments. The development of range sensors and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) technology facilitates our ability to automatically reconstruct level of details 2 (LoD2) models of buildings. However, because of the high...

Publication dans les archives ISPRS des articles soumis dans le cadre de l'évènement ISPRS Geospatial Week 2015.

This paper discusses and presents the specifications of a countrywide 3D data set for The Netherlands and the best practices to generate 3D data accordingly. The specifications extend the OGC 3D standard CityGML to align it to national requirements. Although CityGML offers a solid base for 3D information modeling, we have met the problems of CityGM...

This paper describes a method that aims to find all instances of a certain object in Mobile Laser Scanner (MLS) data. In a userassisted approach, a sample segment of an object is selected, and all similar objects are to be found. By selecting samples from multiple classes, a classification can be performed. Key assumption in this approach is that a...

The Multi-View Stereo (MVS) technology has improved significantly in the last decade, providing a much denser and more accurate point cloud than before. The point cloud now becomes a valuable data for modelling the LOD2 buildings. However, it is still not accurate enough to replace the lidar point cloud. Its relative high level of noise prevents th...

In the task of 3D building model reconstruction from point clouds we face the problem of recovering a roof topology graph in the presence of noise, small roof faces and low point densities. Errors in roof topology graphs will seriously affect the final modelling results. The aim of this research is to automatically correct these errors. We define t...

There are two main challenges when it comes to classifying airborne laser scanning (ALS) data. The first challenge is to find suitable attributes to distinguish classes of interest. The second is to define proper entities to calculate the attributes. In most cases, efforts are made to find suitable attributes and less attention is paid to defining...

Three-dimensional technologies have matured over the years. At the same time, 3D information is becoming increasingly important in many applications. Still it is not straightforward to apply the solutions that work on prototypes, small areas or for specific projects to 3D modeling of a whole nation. In the Netherlands, two initiatives are ongoing t...

We present a method for detecting and modelling rails in mobile laser scanner data. The detection is based on the properties of the rail tracks and contact wires such as relative height, linearity and relative position with respect to other objects. Points classified as rail track are used in a 3D modelling algorithm. The modelling is done by first...

Due to the road safety problem is becoming more and more serious recent years, existing road safety assessment by using automatic method is necessary. Meanwhile, since the pole-like objects have large effect on road safety and are in high demand as facilities to be managed, the automatic pole-like objects extraction is becoming a hot issue. As a re...

B. Xiong, S. Oude Elberink, and G. Vosselman ITC, University of Twente, the Netherlands Keywords: 3D Building Reconstruction, Point Cloud, Roof Topology Graph, Building Primitive Library Abstract. The reconstruction of 3D building models has been extensively researched in the last decade. The model driven methods, which fit building parts to predef...

Building change detection serves to investigate illegal buildings. Illegal built or removed structures, especially those concealed among gable roofs such as dormers, are difficult to track among potentially millions of buildings. Nevertheless, they can be efficiently located in changed areas. An approach is proposed to automatically detect and clas...

Identifying damaged buildings after natural disasters such as earthquake is important for the planning of recovery actions. We present a segment-based approach to classifying damaged building roofs in aerial laser scanning data. A challenge in the supervised classification of point segments is the generation of training samples, which is difficult...

Water run-off modelling applied within urban areas requires an appropriate detailed surface model represented by a raster height grid. Accurate simulations at this scale level have to take into account small but important water barriers and flow channels given by the large-scale map definitions of buildings, street infrastructure, and other terrain...

The objective of the “EuroSDR Mobile Mapping - Road Environment Mapping using Mobile Laser Scanning” project was to evaluate the quality of mobile laser scanning systems and methods with special focus on accuracy and feasibility. Mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems can collect high density point cloud data with high accuracy. A permanent test field...