The conference was held at Preston, the administrative capital of Lancashire which is known as the Red Rose County of England. It was organised and hosted by the Applied Digital Signal and Image Processing (ADSIP) Research Centre at the University of Central Lancashire in collaboration with its European partners in the PIMHAI project (Platform for Analysis of Multispectral and Hyperspectral Images from Acquisition to Interpretation for Environment Monitoring and Decision Makin) funded by European Regional Development Fund under INTERREG IIIB—Atlantic Area.

 

The technical programme over two days consisted of 25 papers from 19 organisations in 7 different countries. It started with an invited session with excellent presentations from Andrew Shaw (Earth Observation Coordinator from the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) on “Earth observation in central government: Meeting the needs of policy makers”, and Nick Holden (Science Manager for Monitoring Techniques from the UK Environment Agency) on “Remote sensing as used by the Environment Agency”. This was followed by four technical sessions and a poster session covering various topics related to remote imaging and spectroscopy. These include data analysis, visualization, registration, segmentation, clustering, classification, and applications.

 

A highlight of the conference was the Immersive and Interactive 3D Technology Demonstration Session at the ADSIP Research Centre. Surrounded by 3 large and reconfigurable screens displaying multi-band remote sensing data mapped on 3D digital terrain, delegates were able to fly through a local area in stereoscopic mode and to perform interactive data manipulation and visualization in real-time.

 

The conference was run in parallel with another conference on Global Built Environment: Towards an Integrated Approach for Sustainability (GBEN 2006). Sessions were synchronized to facilitate mutual attendance, thereby enabling cross-fertilisation of ideas between researchers and practitioners working on environmental monitoring and built environment sustainability.

 

The awards were given during the conference dinner attended by the Vice Chair of the Lancashire County Council, County Councillor Wendy Dwyer. The best paper award went to Julio Martín Herrero from University of Vigo in Spain for his paper on “Real colour in hyperspectral remote sensing”, and the best poster award went to Bo Tang from the University of Central Lancashire in the UK for his poster on “Features correspondence of remote sensing images”.

 

The conference benefited from the support of the IAPR  and IET as well as ADETTI in Portugal, Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in the UK, Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal, Université Bordeaux 1 in France, Universidade de Vigo in Spain, Université de Poitiers in France, and Université de Rennes 1 in France.

 Conference Report:  AECRIS 2006