sam. 11 mars 2017

Hello everyone,

Last March I travelled to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates for the JURSE 2017 conference. The event gathers remote sensing experts and image analysis specialists with a focus on urban areas. This was quite interesting because it falls in the sweet spot between Earth Observation and Computer Vision. I gathered some thoughts below about my time at the conference.

Technical content

As usual, I watched nearly all the talks that dealt with machine learning and image processing for classification or segmentation of remote sensing data. There were some interesting talks on data fusion, e.g. mixing SAR and hyperspectral data using a deep convolutional neural network. Folks from ETHZ presented a very nice deep network for semantic segmentation of "Street View" images. They then match the segmentation with the known 3D model of the city to guess where the picture was taken, and it worked impressively well. The paper won the first best student paper award, so here's that !

On the networking side, I had lots of enlightning discussions about hyperspectral data and deep learning. All the colleagues were very friendly and I really enjoyed talking science during the conference.

I did a talk - and presented a poster - about our residual correction network that we used for Lidar/optical data fusion in CNN, with quite good results on semantic mapping of aerial images. It was well-received and we won the 2nd best student paper award !

Dubai

Dubai is one of the most important cities from the UAE and is famous worldwide for its titanic construction projects. Well, let me tell you that this reputation is deserved : Dubai is a modern city that grew in a desert. Skycrapers are amazingly huge and you can see new construction sites everywhere. The Burj Khalifa, which is the highest skyscraper in the world, is an impressive sight, although you cannot take the elevators to the top. Instead, you stop midway at around 450m, which is enough to have a nice view of the city, but isn't really worth the price (25€) in my opinion. However, the foutain water show at the bottom of the tower is free and super pretty at night.

The city in itself is surprising, as everything is brand new and very modern. You can feel that there are many foreigners living in Dubai as pretty much all the globalized brands are represented. I did not do that much tourism, but the town - especially the Marina - feels a bit artificial. And last but not least, alcohol is hard to find as only authorized hotels and bars can sell it - and they make you pay the price. Anyway, Dubai is an intriguing city but I'm not sure that I would go back for vacation.

Until next time !

Category: conference