The U.V. Helava Award sponsored by Elsevier BV and Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping, LLC is a prestigious ISPRS Award. It was established in 1998 to encourage and stimulate submission to the ISPRS Journal of high-quality scientific papers by individual authors or groups, to promote and advertise the journal, and to honour the outstanding contributions of Dr Uuno V. Helava to research and development in photogrammetry and remote sensing.

The award is presented to authors 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 next Congress. The award consists of a monetary grant of SFr.10,000 and a plaque. The papers are evaluated by a five-member jury comprising experts of high scientific standing whose expertise covers the main topics included within the scope of the journal. A best paper is selected for each year of the four-year evaluation period, and of these one is selected to receive the U.V. Helava Award.

The third U.V. Helava Award will be presented at the 21st ISPRS Congress to be held in Beijing from 3rd to 11th July 2008. The five-member jury appointed by the ISPRS Council has evaluated the 25 papers of Vol. 59 (2004) and announced its decision. The Best Paper is: ‘A layered stereo matching algorithm using image segmentation and global visibility constraints’ by Michael Bleyer and Margrit Gelautz of the Interactive Media Systems Group, Institute for Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology, Favoritenstrasse 9-11/188/2, A-1040 Vienna, Austria.

Jury Rationale
The problem of (stereo) matching is of broad interest in image processing and, of course, especially in photogrammetry and remote sensing. This paper is, to the jury’s knowledge, the first to handle planar patches when deriving dense stereo from two images, and at the same time performs an objective evaluation using the Middlebury test dataset. The theoretically sound techniques published up to now cannot deal rigorously with this situation. Everybody developing a stereo algorithm trying to cope with unstructured scene patches should read this paper. The ideas are innovative, well described and critically analysed. On behalf of the ISPRS and the U.V. Helava Award jury, I would like to congratulate the authors on this distinction and to thank them for their contribution. I would also like to thank the sponsors of the award, and jury members for their thorough evaluations.