SFPT Jubilee
Article

SFPT Jubilee

On 4th June 2009 the Société Française de Photogrammétrie et Télédetection (SFPT), an ordinary member of ISPRS, celebrated its fiftieth birthday. This important event for the French Photogrammetric and Remote Sensing community was marked by a workshop held at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) in Paris, where SFPT first president Georges Poivilliers, inventor of several photogrammetric devices, occupied the Chair of Photogrammetry in the 1950s, before becoming president of the Académie des Sciences.

 

Opening

The workshop was opened by Laurent Polidori, current SFPT president. Subsequent speeches were delivered by the two major sustaining members of SFPT: IGN and CNES. Patrice Parisé, IGN directeur general, and Stéphane Janichewski, CNES directeur général délégué, both recalled and renewed their strong support for SFPT. ISPRS president Orhan Altan congratulated the SFPT on its achievements and contribution to ISPRS, before presenting the important ISPRS Beijing declaration and presenting Laurent Polidori with an ISPRS award for outstanding SFPT achievement in relation to ISPRS.

 

History

Two SFPT founders, Maurice Carbonell (also, with Hans Foramitti, founder of CIPA) and Robert Vincent then recalled the history of the SFPT, its founders and some major French technical and scientific pioneers: Laussedat, Poivilliers and Masson d'Autume. We learnt that the SFPT would by now have been one hundred years old had photogrammetry  not been included as a branch of the Société Française de Photographie for nearly half a century! Yves Egels, one of the pioneers of French digital photogrammetry since the 70s, continued with a speech on the inventions and inventors of his discipline, showing that most of our current photogrammatic techniques and devices had already, surprisingly, been imagined and described a century ago. Alain Baudoin, president of ISPRS Commission I for the term 2004-2008, then revisited the history of French earth-observation remote sensing through the saga of the different generations of SPOT satellites, concluding with the Pleïade satellite, soon to be launched. All the historical material presented at this jubilee workshop will be published in 2010 in a special issue of the Revue Française de Photogrammétrie et Télédétection.

 

General Assembly

The day continued with SFPT's annual general assembly. At the end of this, Nicolas Paparoditis, president, ISPRS Commission III, presented advances and forthcoming events from his commission: LASERSCANNING09, CMRT09 and of course the symposium PCV'10. Closing words came from president Laurent Polidori, who announced a French bid in 2012 in Melbourne to host the ISPRS congress in 2016 in Paris. The workshop ended with a contribution from Mahzad Kalantari, an Iranian student who won SFPT's best student paper of 2008. She gave a talk on stereo pose estimation, mixing photogrammetric and computer-vision techniques, and received her award in the form of a cheque for EUR3,000 from president Laurent Polidori.

 

 

 

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