3D geoinformation

Congratulations to Dr. Weixiao Gao on Winning the 2025 EuroSDR PhD Award and EAASI Outstanding Thesis Award! 🎉

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0100

We are delighted to announce that our colleague, Dr. Weixiao Gao, has been doubly honored for his outstanding PhD research. He has been named a joint winner of the 2025 EuroSDR PhD Award and the sole winner of the 2025 EAASI Outstanding Thesis Award. This remarkable dual recognition highlights the exceptional scientific merit and significant practical impact of his work, bridging the gap between cutting-edge academic research and real-world industrial applications in geomatics.

Dr. Gao’s thesis, “Semantic Understanding of Urban Scenes from Textured Meshes”, conducted under the supervision of Dr. Hugo Ledoux and Dr. Liangliang Nan, tackles core challenges in modern 3D geoinformation. His research establishes a foundational pipeline for interpreting complex urban textured meshes—derived from aerial imagery—by creating benchmark datasets, developing efficient interactive annotation tools, and introducing novel deep learning algorithms. The core outcome is an automated framework for generating lightweight, semantically rich 3D city models (LoD3), which directly translates to improved efficiency and reduced costs in digital city reconstruction for the wider geospatial industry.

Congratulations Dr. León Sánchez！

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0100

On Monday, 6th October, 2025, Camilo León Sánchez successfully defended his PhD thesis at TU Delft.

Camilo’s PhD thesis is entitled Enhancing urban energy applications through semantic 3D city models and open data: The case of the Netherlands. (PDF freely available).

Congratulations, Dr. León Sánchez 🎉

Congratulations to Weixiao Gao and Ivan Pađen on Winning Open Science Awards! 🎉

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0200

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Weixiao Gao and Ivan Pađen have been honoured in the Open Science Awards of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment.

This award recognises their exceptional commitment to advancing open, transparent, and collaborative research practices.

Dr. Weixiao Gao received the Researcher Award for his project “SUMs: Open-source tools and data sets for understanding urban environments from oblique aerial images.”
Ivan Pađen received the Student Award for his project “City4CFD: An open-source tool for creating CFD simulation-ready 3D models of cities.”

Their work embodies the spirit of Open Science by creating valuable, reusable resources for the wider scientific community. Congratulations to both on this well-deserved recognition! 🎉

⚡ We're hiring: one position available as Postdoc researcher!

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 18:00:00 +0200

We are looking for a new colleague who will work with us in the recently funded EU project Energy Data and Flexibility Management for Positive Energy Districts.

Deadline to apply is 16 November 2025.

Details are available on this page.

Welcome Inés and Hiba!

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 16:00:00 +0200

We are excited to welcome two new members to the 3D Geoinformation group this month: Inés and Hiba!

Inés joins us as a PhD researcher and Junior Lecturer. Her research focuses on the long-term transformation of train station areas and the role of pedestrian movement patterns in shaping these transformations. She works at the fascinating intersection of time and space!

Hiba is our new PhD researcher whose work will be part of the recently awarded RenoDAT project. Her research focuses on 3D geoinformation for building renovation passports and energy transition.

Welcome to the team, Hiba and Inés! We look forward to working with you!

3D geoinformation group shines at 3DGeoinfo - ⚡ Camilo wins Best Young Researcher Award.

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 10:00:00 +0200

On September 2-5 2025, our research group participated in the joint conference of the 20th International 3D GeoInfo and the 9th International Smart Data and Smart Cities hosted by the Center of Spatial Information Science at the University of Tokyo.

We presented eight publications covering diverse aspects of 3D geoinformation:

Additionally, our colleague Clara García-Sánchez delivered a keynote speech sharing insights on advancing 3D modeling techniques with a focus on urban flow simulations.

Finally, we are proud to announce that our colleague Camilo León-Sánchez won the Best Young Researcher Award at the 9th Smart Data Smart Cities conference for his paper “Lessons learnt from the integration of open data and semantic 3D city models for urban building energy modelling in the Netherlands”.

This publication presents valuable insights from the integration of open datasets in the Netherlands for the creation of a country-wide enriched semantic 3D city model for urban building energy modelling.

Congratulations to Camilo and his co-authors!

Welcome Yanning!

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0200

Yanning Qiu has recently joined our research group as a Postdoctoral Researcher. She will be working on the development of an AI-powered smart sensing and monitoring system to better understand the dynamics of urban waste in Amsterdam, as part of the Schone Binnenstad project funded by the AMS Institute.

Before joining our group, Yanning completed her PhD and a postdoctoral position at Wageningen University & Research. Her PhD research combined field monitoring, remote sensing, and mathematical modelling to evaluate the long-term ecological outcomes of dryland restoration projects from a resilience perspective. During her postdoctoral research, she applied AI-assisted literature analysis and statistical modelling to quantify and characterize micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in both the environment and the human body, with the aim of supporting microplastic health risk assessment.

Welcome, Yanning!

Welcome Hidemichi!

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 10:00:00 +0200

Hidemichi Baba has recently joined our research group as a PhD candidate. He brings a strong academic and professional foundation that combines expertise in web technologies and project management with a focused research interest in computational geometry, 3D city modelling, and cloud GIS. His professional experience has equipped him with practical skills in web development and leading collaborative projects across teams and organizations.

In his Master’s thesis (link to PDF), Hidemichi developed FlatCityBuf, a cloud-optimized data format for CityJSON, enabling efficient partial access to large datasets through spatial indexing, attribute indexing, and HTTP range requests.

For his PhD research, he will focus on methodologies for 3D city model reconstruction using heterogeneous datasets and on developing environments that facilitate the integration and use of reconstructed models in real-world applications. He is part of our MultiRoofs project.

Welcome, Hidemichi!

🎉SUM Parts Accepted at CVPR 2025🎉

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0200

Our new paper on urban mesh segmentation has been accepted at CVPR 2025:

SUM Parts: Benchmarking Part-Level Semantic Segmentation of Urban Meshes . Weixiao Gao, Liangliang Nan, and Hugo Ledoux. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025.
PDF BibTeX

@            @InProceedings{Gao_2025_CVPR,
            author    = {Gao, Weixiao and Nan, Liangliang and Ledoux, Hugo},
            title     = {SUM Parts: Benchmarking Part-Level Semantic Segmentation of Urban Meshes},
            booktitle = {Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR)},
            month     = {June},
            year      = {2025},
            pages     = {24474-24484}
            }
}

Research Highlights

Dr. Weixiao Gao presented this work at CVPR 2025 in Nashville, showcasing our three key contributions:

First large-scale benchmark: 2.5km² urban textured meshes with part-level semantic labels across 21 object classes
Novel annotation framework: Unified tool for efficient labeling of mesh faces and textures
Comprehensive analysis: Benchmarking of 3D semantic segmentation methods on urban objects

Project Resources

Project: SUM Parts Benchmarks
Code: GitHub
Data: Hugging Face
Video: YouTube Explainer

This work advances our group’s research on 3D urban modeling following our previous SUM dataset published in ISPRS 2021.

⚡ Fully-funded PhD available!

Fri, 02 May 2025 11:00:00 +0200

We are looking for a new PhD student who will work with us on the recently awarded RenoDAT (“Accelerating Building RENOvation and Decarbonization Through DATa Integration”) project. The PhD position is in 3D Geoinformation for Building Renovation Passports and Energy Transition.

Deadline to apply is 15 June 2025.

Details are available on this page.