Congratulations to Dr. Parvaneh Saeedi for winning NSERC�s University Faculty Award in the 2007 competition!

 SFU�s Professors Awarded NSERC Strategic Project Award

 Professors Parvaneh Saeedi (PI), Kamal Gupta, and Robert Woodbury have been awarded $230,318 over three years for the project "Automatic 3D Complex Building Detection from Satellite Imagery".  MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. contributes an additional budget of $130,920 over the 3 years.

The extraction of 3D geometric building information from high-resolution electro-optical imagery is becoming a key element in numerous geospatial applications. Indeed, producing 3D urban models is a requirement for a variety of applications, such as spatial analysis of urban design, military simulation, and site monitoring of a particular geographic location. Almost all operational approaches developed over the years for 3D building reconstruction are semi-automated ones, where a skilled human operator is involved in the 3D geometry modeling of building instances, a time-consuming process. Further, such approaches usually require stereo image pairs, image sequences, or laser scanning of a specific geographic location to extract the 3D models from the imagery. Finally, with current techniques, the 3D geometric modeling phase may be characterized by the extraction of 3D building models with low accuracy levels. This research aims for a fully automated 3D Structure Detection that copes with imaging of arbitrary viewpoint variations, clutter, and occlusion using monocular panchromatic air/spaceborne images. The system will be designed to deal with complications arising from complex shapes and interference due to the close proximity of urban city buildings. There are numerous applications for a consistent reliable system of extracting geometric information from remotely sensed imagery. Some of these include: urban planning and airport hazard analysis, civilian emergency mitigation, natural disaster management (flooding, earthquakes, and landslides), military surveillance (active engagement of force, counter terrorism and peace keeping measures, and for statistical geographic localization (such as health, crime, and past natural disasters).