Geobia 2010

Geobia 2010 took place in Belgium, at Ghent University's Town Hall building from 29th June to 2nd July, GEOBIA standing for Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis and this was the third conference on this subject, previous meetings having been held in 2006 in Salzburg, Austria, and 2008 in the Canadian venue of Calgary. The Ghent conference was organised in international cooperation between Ghent University in Belgium, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and the University of Twente, ITC, The Netherlands, and the organising committee chaired by Frieke Van Coillie and Eliabeth Addink can look back on a very successful event.

The Mayor of Ghent welcomed an estimated two hundred international scientists and practitioners to the city's Town Hall, an impressive mediaeval building dating from 1482 AD with a splendid interior. After this formal welcome, participants took the few minute's walk through the historic city centre to continue the icebreaker party at ‘Het Pand'. This former thirteenth-century Dominican monastery on the banks of the River Leie is one of the oldest buildings in Ghent, today used by the university.

The two-day conference was opened by Prof. Luc Moens, vice-rector of Ghent University. Keynotes were presented by Elisabeth Addink, Gilson Costa, Prof Martien Molenaar and Stefan Lang. During the parallel sessions almost eighty oral presentations were held on several topics relating to Geobia.

Some 35 posters were on display, and one-minute oral introductions to these were given during coffee breaks. You may consider it professional defamation, but every time I think about geobia techniques it has to do with aerial or satellite imagery; one of the posters, however, showed this technology applied at microscopic scale, developing an OBIA rule-set to assess the 2D spatial distribution of concrete constituents. Presented by Eric Masson, University of Lille, France, this application is worth reading about.

The 2010 Geobia ended with a closing reception at the Great Butchers Hall, again a beautiful location dating back to the fifteenth century. The next edition of the event will be hosted by the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) Brazil, in collaboration with the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Perhaps some questions raised during this conference will be solved by then; identifying types of grass, for example, (it is grass, but what kind: lawn, meadow, sports field, natural etc?) Or that of time factor: did the identified object move in time or is it a new object?