Gottfried Konecny: the ambassador of photogrammetry and remote sensing for 75 years

ABSTRACT

A 90th birthday would be a milestone celebration for any person, but exceptionally rare if the person is still active after 75 years of working and serving the photogrammetric and remote sensing communities worldwide. This unprecedented career is the motivation to reflect on the technological developments of the past 75 years in the light of Gottfried Konecny’s lifetime achievements. I started to get to know Gottfried not long before he officially retired from the Institute for Photogrammetry and Engineering Surveys in 1998. Furthermore, I was not even born when he, as a young and talented scholar supported by the Fulbright Scholarship from the US Government, arrived at the Ohio State University (OSU), which has been my professional home for three decades. In the second half of Gottfried’s 75-year career, the technological changes have been phenomenal, and, furthermore, shown an accelerating trend in the past few years. It is absolutely remarkable how Gottfried has been able to keep up with these rapid changes and advancing technologies and exploits them for mapping and, in general, for all the users of the geospatial field at large. Additionally, his open-minded and kind personality has been always a major plus to his technical skills and experiences, and ultimately helped him assist many colleagues to advance their careers, and along the way developed and increased the use of geospatial data and systems in support of many countries worldwide.

KEYWORDS:

• Photogrammetry
• remote sensing
• space observation

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Charles K. Toth

Charles Toth is a research professor in the Dept. of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering, The Ohio State University. He received a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Geo-Information Sciences from the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary. His research interests and expertise cover broad areas of spatial information sciences and systems, including airborne photogrammetry and computer vision, navigation and georeferencing, multi-sensor geospatial data acquisition systems, such as GNSS/IMU and other sensor integration for navigation in GNSS-challenged environments, sensors and algorithms for indoor and personal navigation, image-based navigation using Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, and UAS and mobile mapping technologies for outdoor/indoor applications.