The U.V. Helava Award, sponsored by Elsevier BV and Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping, LLC, is a prestigious ISPRS Award established in 1998 to encourage and stimulate submission to the ISPRS Journal of high-quality scientific papers by individual authors or groups. The aim is to promote and advertise the journal, and to honour the outstanding contribution made by Dr Uuno V. Helava to research and development in photogrammetry and remote sensing. The award is presented to author(s) 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 preceding the next Congress. The award consists of a monetary grant of SFr.10,000, and a plaque. Submissions for the award are evaluated by a five-member jury of eminent scientific experts in the main topics covered by the journal. For each year of the four-year evaluation period the best paper is selected, and one of these four will receive the U.V. Helava Award. The third such will be presented at the 21th ISPRS Congress to be held in Beijing from 3rd to 11th July 2008. The jury appointed by ISPRS Council has now evaluated the thirty papers of Vol. 61 (2006) and duly announced its decision. The winner is Range Determination with Waveform Recording Laser Systems Using a Wiener Filter by Boris Jutziand Uwe Stilla.

Jury Rationale
This article presents fundamental research on the new technology of full-waveform laser-scanning systems, collecting the physical and theoretical signal tools necessary for deep and complete analysis. The suggested approximation with the Wiener Filter for recovering surface response appears useful. In terms of practical relevance this work also scores high, dealing as it does with the signal behaviour of the wavelength laser-scanner and its interaction with multi-range surfaces. The research work presented here would seem, furthermore, generic and not limited to scanners only. The paper is clear in presentation and the experiment very descriptive. On behalf of the ISPRS and the U.V. Helava Award jury, I would like to congratulate the authors on this distinction and thank them for their contribution. I would also like to thank the sponsors of the award, and jury members for their thorough evaluations.

1FGAN-FOM Research Institute for Optronics and Pattern Recognition, 76275 Ettlingen, Germany.
2Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Technical University Munich, 80290 Munich, Germany.