Category: Research

  • Assessing road criticality and loss of healthcare accessibility during floods: the case of Cyclone Idai, Mozambique 2019

    Featured Image: Road network analysis for the driving profiles. A Normal conditions before the flood event. B Evolution of scores after the floods induced by Cyclone Idai. The lower row shows a close-up of the area surrounding the city of Dondo The ability of disaster response, preparedness, and mitigation efforts to assess the loss of physical access to health…

  • New paper on the automatic characterization of surface activities from 4D point clouds

    An approach for automatic characterization of surface activities from large 4D point clouds is presented in a new paper by Daan Hulskemper et al. in collaboration between the 3DGeo research group and the departments of Geoscience and Remote Sensing and Coastal Engineering at TU Delft. Hulskemper, D., Anders, K., Antolínez, J. A. Á., Kuschnerus, M.,…

  • OSHDB Version 1.0 Has Arrived

    Featured Photo: Ohsome dashboard interface for Heidelberg, Germany. In the words of Confucius, “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” As we release OSHDB (OpenStreetMap History Database) Version 1.0, we look back at versions 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, and all the other small improvements to our historical OpenStreetMap database as the…

  • Open Data: Multi-platform point clouds and orthophotos of the inland dune in Sandhausen

    The commune Sandhausen (Baden-Württemberg) got its name from the inland dune, which is located in the area of the village. In 2021 and 2022, the 3DGeo group of Heidelberg University conducted UAV-based and ground-based surveys of three areas of the inland dune of Sandhausen to acquire 3D point clouds and orthophotos. The dataset is freely and…

  • Improved Performance of HELIOS++ using High Performance Computing Techniques

    The software HELIOS++ simulates the laser scanning of a given virtual scene that can be composed of different spatial primitives and 3D meshes with distinct granularity. The high computational cost of this type of simulation software demands efficient computational solutions. Classical solutions based on GPU are not well suited when irregular geometries compose the scene…

  • New(s) story about Sensing Mountains Summer School 2022

    The fourth edition of the Innsbruck Summer School of Alpine Research took place in September 2022, finally back in the lovely mountain landscape of the Ötztal valley in Tyrol, Austria. Once again, 40 participants – young researchers from all over the world – gathered in Obergurgl to learn and exchange about new concepts and solutions…

  • New paper: Capturing complex star dune dynamics – repeated highly accurate surveys combining multitemporal 3D topographic measurements and local wind data

    Morphologies of highly complex star dunes are the result of aeolian dynamics in past and present times. These dynamics reflect climatic conditions and associated forces like sediment availability and vegetation cover, as well as feedbacks with adjacent environments. However, an understanding of aeolian dynamics on star dune morphometries is still lacking sufficient detail, and their…

  • Human-in-the-loop development of spatially adaptive ground point filtering pipelines — An archaeological case study

    LiDAR data have become indispensable for research in archaeology and a variety of other topographic applications. To derive products (e.g. digital terrain or feature models, individual trees, buildings), the 3D LiDAR points representing the desired objects of interest within the acquired and georeferenced point cloud need to be identified. This process is known as classification,…

  • Open Healthcare Access Map Update and HDX

    Last year we started the Open Healthcare Access Map.  Initially, only a few countries and later on continents were featured. Today, we are pleased to announce that we are releasing a number of previously missing countries, achieving global coverage. The Open Healthcare Access Map uses healthcare facilities extracted from OpenStreetMap, the isochrone method from openrouteservice…

  • Access to safe abortion in Germany

    Our team thoroughly enjoyed the newly in-person State of the Map 2022 in Florence. We attended workshops, talks, and had the opportunity to present our own poster about the accessibility of abortion clinics in Germany, which will be discussed in this post and can be found here. In the following blog, we’ll explore more information…

  • How to become ohsome part 14 – Advanced dashboarding

    Hello again and welcome back to our “How to become ohsome” series where we demonstrate how you too can become ohsome with ohsome API! If you’re new to the series or need a refresher, check out the older installments in our series, like this or this one covering the various ways of accessing ohsome API. And now to our…

  • Continued multisource 3D point cloud acquisition at the AHK rock glacier

    While the impacts of global warming and current heat waves on glaciated areas have been in the focus of media reporting in recent weeks, also the dynamics of rock glaciers as part of the periglacial environment are strongly affected by changing climate. Rock glaciers are creep phenomena of mountain permafrost and an integral part of…