The COMET Topography workshop just completed (31/3/2016 – 1/4/2016) with great success. It was hosted by the Oxford University Earth Sciences and ably lead by Austin Elliott (also active here: @TTremblingEarth). John Elliott, David Mackenzie, and Zhou Yu made important contributions. Professors Barry Parsons and Rich Walker provided oversight. I had a great time helping out with the workshop. It was great fun to share our enthusiasm for high resolution topography and to represent and present OpenTopography to the esteemed group of mostly earthquake faulting and volcano scientists.
The workshop emphasized topography produced from photogrammetric methods. The first emphasis was on more traditional photogrammetry applied to relatively high resolution space-based bi- or tri-stereo imaging (e.g., SPOT and Pleiades). The software of choice was ERDAS Imagine with its Photogrammetry Suite. I enjoyed learning more about this technology and these data which the Oxford team among others has been using with great success for characterizing active faulting.The second emphasis was on Structure from Motion--something I have some more experience with. It was great to see the strong interest and burgeoning expertise among the various participants as they apply this methodology with ground and UAV-based images to a range of faulting and volcanic problems. The OpenTopography workshops over the last couple of years have featured SfM as well (with great contributions from Ed Nissen). I got a good primer on georeferencing and networked SfM.
The workshop agenda is here: link.
See also this nice blog post about the workshop: link.
The group photo. Sunny moment in Oxford; lots of great scientific power here and a fun lot too! Photo by David Sandwell (Oxford University).
Introductory science motivations: "Sharpening our view of earth processes with high resolution topography". Photo by David Sandwell (Oxford University).
