Dr.-Ing. Uwe Stilla
Professor
Institute of Photogrammetry and Cartography
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
Germany

Biography
Uwe Stilla was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1957. In 1980, he received a diploma (Dipl-Ing) in electrical engineering from Gesamthochschule Paderborn, Germany, and in 1987 he received an additional diploma (Dipl-Ing) in biomedical engineering from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. From 1990 until 2004, he was with the Institute of Optronics and Pattern Recognition (FGAN-FOM), a German research establishment for defence-related studies. In 1993, he received his PhD (doctor of engineering) from the University of Karlsruhe with work in the field of pattern recognition. Since 2004 Uwe Stilla is professor at Technische Universitaet Muenchen, head of the Department of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and currently director of the Institute of Photogrammetry and Cartography. He is dean of Student Affairs of the Bachelor's and Master Program ''Geodesy and Geoinformation'' and the international Master Programs ''Earth Oriented Space Science and Technology (ESPACE)'' and ''Cartography''. He has the chair of the ISPRS working group ''Pattern Analysis in Remote Sensing (PARS)'', is principal investigator of the International Graduate School of Science and Engineering (IGSSE), vice president of the German Society of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation (DGPF), member of the Scientific Board of German Commission of Geodesy (DGK), and member of Commission for Geodesy and Glaciology (KEG) of the Bavarian Academy of Science and Humanities. He has been the organizer and Chair of the conferences "Photogrammetric Image Analysis (PIA)", "City Models, Roads and Traffic (CMRT)", GRSS/ISPRS Joint Urban Remote Sensing Event (JURSE 2011), and "Earth Observation and Global Changes (EOGC 2011)". His research focuses on image analysis in the field of photogrammetry and remote sensing. He published more than 300 contributions.

Abstract
Ultra High Resolution Radar Remote Sensing of Urban Areas

In the last decade strong progress has been made in the field of urban monitoring by synthetic aperture radar (SAR) from airborne and space-borne platforms. This achievement was reached by developments of new sensor systems as well as advanced processing techniques for SAR data. The presentation addresses examples of leading-edge research work in this field. Extended SAR mapping using multi-aspect and multi-baseline acquisition allows overcoming the typical and inherent problems of layover and shadow resulting from the side-looking SAR geometry. New techniques based on maximum-likelihood approaches and tomography applied on interferometric SAR deliver point clouds of object surfaces comparable with LiDAR or stereo image matching. Modern airborne SAR systems provide spatial sampling with decimeter or even some centimeter spacing. Examples of leading-edge decimeter and sub-decimeter resolution SAR images are taken by the experimental sensor systems MEMPHIS and PAMIR (Fraunhofer-FHR). In such ultra high resolution (UHR) SAR imagery, vehicles appear not just as blobs or spots in the image, but rather show a certain structure that can be exploited using structure based approaches for the detection of single vehicles or groups of vehicles. In forest areas the canopy structure of single trees become visible. This way the detection problem, formerly tackled by statistics, can be treated as an image based detection problem making use of many powerful algorithms and representative features describing the vehicle or tree appearance in the image. Furthermore, latest development of airborne SAR imaging shows on one side that a lightweight Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW)-SAR system is operational on a small aircraft (e.g. UAV, RPAS) and on the other side that real-time SAR processing on board and ground based monitoring by streaming of the SAR image offers a variety of new and interesting applications.