University of Salzburg - Department of Geoinformatics - Z_GIS

Z_GIS is an interdisciplinary department (80 scientific and technical staff) established at Paris-Lodron University, Salzburg. It is dedicated to fundamental and applied research, integrated spatial analysis, outreach activities and networking, professional education (www.unigis.net) and training. As experts for the spatial view, Z_GIS focuses on interoperable GIS, spatial modelling, satellite remote sensing, image analysis, etc.

Z_GIS is strongly involved in EU-funded RTD activities, development cooperation and educational projects and is actively supporting and promoting the Copernicus initiative in an interdisciplinary research and communication scheme by fostering new technologies for EO-based spatial decision support and policy implementation. Z_GIS is inextricably linked with the OBIA (object-based image analysis) approach.

• Data integration (multi-source, multi-temporal, multi-sensor), including socio-economic data
• Research for Copernicus service development and validation of information products
• Research topics: humanitarian action, disaster risk reduction, environmental management, climate change adaptation
• Spatio-temporal, fully automated image understanding routines

The OBIA lab fosters advanced image understanding, pooling methods and techniques from remote sensing, image processing and spatial analysis. The approach gained international attention and widespread use in various application fields. We work in a multi-scale and multi-purpose application environment, dealing with the challenges of data and semantic interoperability, automated classification, and multi-temporal change assessments.