The fellowship was awarded to Helge Aasen in support for his PhD project «The acquisition of hyperspectral digital surface models of crops from UAV snapshot cameras”. Since April 2013, Helge developed a new approach to capture information about agricultural crops by utilizing advances in the field of robotics, sensor technology, computer vision and photogrammetry. In particular, he used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) together with novel hyperspectral snapshot cameras to generate Hyperspectral digital surface models (HS DSMs) – a representation of a surface in 3D space linked with hyperspectral information emitted and reflected by the objects covered by that surface. The overall research aim of his thesis was to evaluate if HS DSMs are suited to support a site-specific crop management in precision agriculture.

In June 2016, Helge successfully defended his PhD thesis. For his postdoc he has now moved to the CropScienceLab at ETH Zürich (please insert the following link: http://www.kp.ethz.ch/people/person-detail.html?persid=231474) where he has become part of the PhenoFly project (please insert link: http://www.kp.ethz.ch/infrastructure/uav-phenofly.html). Within the project, he continues his PhD work and develops methods to detect plant traits important for field phenotyping and precision agriculture applications to facilitate a more sustainable use of resources.

Helge greatly acknowledges the support of the Graduate School of Geosciences during his PhD. The funding helped him to prepare his thesis as well as two papers.

Published papers:
Tilly, N., Aasen, H., Bareth, G., 2015. Fusion of Plant Height and Vegetation Indices for the Estimation of Barley Biomass. Remote Sensing 7, 11449–11480. doi:10.3390/rs70911449

Publication in progress:
Aasen, H., Bolten, A., in review. Multi-temporal high-resolution imaging spectroscopy with hyperspectral 2D imagers – from theory to application.

Helge Aasen
PhD student

Institute of Geography

Thesis: “The acquisition of hyperspectral digital surface models of crops from UAV snapshot cameras”
Professor Dr. Georg Bareth
Defense: June 2016