Early autumn this year saw two ISPRS Commissions, III and V, holding their quadrennial symposia, both in Germany; Commission III gathered in Bonn and Commission V in Dresden.

Photogrammetric Vision
The Commission III symposium took place from 19th to 22nd September in Bonn. Consisting entirely of double-blind reviewed papers, the symposium featured a single-track, high-quality programme of thirty-minute talks that gave rise to vivacious and intensive discussion. Of seventy submitted full papers, the programme committee selected twenty-four for oral, and twenty for poster presentation. Three days of discussions between photogrammetric and computer-vision researchers focused on building, road and vehicle extraction, laser range-data analysis, surface reconstruction, Lidar and SAR processing, as well as image orientation. They were preceded by two tutor-ials, respectively given by Peter Sturm on ‘Modeling and Analysing Images of Generic Cameras’ and David Nister on ‘Recognition and 3D Reconstruction from Video’, and complemented by a boat trip on the river Rhine. There were three best paper awards, the first prize presented by conference chair Wolfgang Förstner to Matthias Butenuth of Hanover University for his work on ‘Segmentation of Imagery Using Network Snakes’.

Image Engineering
The quadrennial symposium of ISPRS Commission V took place from 25th to 27th September 2006 in Dresden. This symposium was organised by the Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing of TU Dresden. Commission V deals with optical 3D-measurement techniques in fields such as industrial production and quality control, cultural heritage recording, terrestrial laser scanning, virtual-reality data acquisition, 3D-motion analysis, robotics, and quantitative biomedical imaging. Driven by progress in sensor technology, algorithms and data-processing capabilities, the focus of ISPRS Commission V has propagated into a wide range of new application fields. A central issue in many developments is the integration of sensor technology with reliable data-processing schemes to generate highly automated online or real-time photogrammetric measurement systems. Here we often find the term ‘image engineering’ standing for custom-made solutions based on active and passive sensing and illumination devices combined with task-specific image analysis techniques. Terrestrial laser scanning has become a thriving topic in photogrammetry, adding a new dimension to cultural heritage recording, as-built documentation and facility management. Commission V has seen a large number of successful research projects passing into practical application, providing efficient solutions for new measurement tasks. These developments have opened up immense and so far only rudimentarily exhausted new markets for photogrammetry.

The symposium gave an overview of the state of the art and recent developments in image engineering and vision metrology based on image and laser-scanner data. It was accompanied by an exhibition participated in by 21 companies and attended by more than 250 participants.

Proceedings may be obtained from the Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (www.tu-dresden.de/ipf/photo/).