Overview MSc Research Topics
Improved quality of life is one of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) underlined sectors to be incorporated "in every urban development or renewal policy and strategy" (UN-Habitat, 2017).
2D outlines or footprints of buildings are either generated from high resolution images or point cloud data.
3D models such as Building information models (BIM) are valuable for industry for various planning purposes.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used within an Internet of Things (IoT) network where the
Protected areas are useful governance tool to mitigate biodiversity loss and preserve threatened habitats and species.
Global production, transportation, and consumption of oil can cause inevitable spills into the environment (typically from pipelines, oil wells, and storage facilities) cont
These days simple tools exist that allow everyone to make maps, and subsequently use social media to disseminate the maps, with can reach millions.
More and more cities are developing digital twins of their crucial public infrastructures.
The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is changing worldwide due to shifting cli
Climate planning has been arising since the Paris Agreement [1]. However, the last data shows that the proposed goals are far from being reached in time [2;3].
Annotations in an interactive atlas environment will support the user to execute atlas tasks, and help them to better understand what they see in respect to the (carto)graphic representations used,
For Orisha, India, the Forages-group is building a comprehensive geo-database of imagery and agricultural (land-use) statistics.
For years, MODIS images have been instrumental in divers environmental and ecological studies such as monitoring deforestation, land-us/land-cover (LULC) changes, agriculture and epidemiology.
Green spaces are fundamental for the well-being of individuals and communities as they provide areas for recreation, which is essential for the quality of life in cities.
Climate change is expected to affect many natural processes on earth.
Saffron is the most costly spice by weight worldwide, and an important ingredient for Middle-Ea
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been a public health emergency of global concern since its outbreak in 2019/2020.
The decisions made on the spatial configurations and distributions in the built environments (urban or rural developments) directly affect the environment as well as the interests of various stakeh
3D models such as Building information models (BIM) are valuable for industry for various planning purposes.
Urban land surface temperature (ULST) dynamics are influenced by a myriad of factors related to urban landscape character.
Rainfall data series from climate models (i.e.
Rainfall data series from climate models (i.e.
Pastoralists and non-pastoralists in Sub Saharan Africa have been engaging in land use conflicts which are associated with environmental, climatic, political, economic and social
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates the global community must remove up to1000 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) by 2100 to limit warming to no more than 1.5°
The Antarctic ice sheet covers almost the whole area of the Antarctic continent.
Artificial intelligence (AI) for urban development is growing rapidly.
Interest in the formal representation of citizen science comes from portals, platforms, and catalogues of citizen science projects; scientists using citizen science data for their research; and fun
Sentinel-1, with a constellation of radar satellites, operates day and night, providing freely accessible, consistent, and time series SAR images of every part of the Earth.
Nepal is one of the poorest countries and affected by multi-hazard risks, including earthquakes, landslides and floods.
When disasters happen, it's important to include the people who are affected in making decisions and getting ready for emergencies.
LAI is one of the most critical vegetation biophysical variables as well as remote sensing- enabled essential biodiversity variables due to the controlling role of green leaves in biological and ph
Land or property tax is one of the oldest forms of taxation; it is relatively fair and it is not easy to hide properties.
With the advent of the new OGC API family of standards it has finally become possible to design and implement fully REST based dissemination systems.
Coniferous species are present in almost all major vegetation biomes on Earth.
A key task for conservation science is to collect accurate and precise data on animal distribution.
One of the aims of conservation and rewilding groups in Europe is to assess whether natural grazing l
The strong interaction between health and disaster risk reduction has been made explicit by the current pandemic crisis.
Postharvest losses are a main threat to food security, which is a measurable waste of the edible share of food that is available for consumption but is not
Farmers want to use less water to produce more food.
Satellite image time series (SITS) data are increasingly being used for vegetation-related remote sensing applications.
Object detection is a fundamental topic in computer vision. Recently, deep learning has become an effective method and achieved great success in object detection.
The estimation of depth from a single image have been a Computer Vision topic for decades.
The presence of noises, clouds and another atmospheric phenomena represent an obstacle for optical remote sensing applications.
Brazil is the biggest coffee productors in the world, with millions of hectares of plantations.
Estimating aboveground biomass is essential for generating vegetation inventories and understanding carbon cycles.
Estimating aboveground biomass is essential for generating vegetation inventories and understanding carbon cycles.
An accurate method for automatically mapping deforested areas constitute an important tool to inform and enable deforestation containment policies.
An accurate method for automatically mapping deforested areas constitute an important tool to inform and enable deforestation containment policies.
Aboveground forest biomass has fundamental role in carbon cycling, climate processes, and global warming.
The climate in cities and metropolitan areas (i.e., urban climate) is often different from the climate in the surrounding rural areas due to the presence of buildings, pavement, a
Mapping and monitoring slums is essential to ensure the sustainable development of the cities to ensure a quality of life for people.
In general classes such as Buildings and Vegetation and Terrain are well classified. The classes Bridges and Water are more problematic, even for deep learning algorithms.
To model air pollution in urban environments while accounting for urban forms using convolutional neural networks (CNN) or Vision Transformers (ViT), open access earth observation
The problem of 3D spatial perception involves the real-time construction and maintenance of a comprehensive and actionable representation of the environment using sensor data and prior knowledge.
Downward-looking satellite sensors are used to display our three-dimensional (3D) world with 2D remote sensing imagery.
Deep Neural Networks (DNN) is considered as a panacea for different problems in several application areas. But what about spatial modeling?
The student will initially revise the existing literature on image matching algorithms using CNN as backbone.
High amounts of particles or harmful gases in the air damage the health of humans and ecosystems.
The goal of this study is to detect and map bark beetle infestation in a temperate forest in Germany using DESIS hyperspectral satellite
The goal of this study, as part of the larger BIOSPACE project, is to map and model foliar pigments, including chlorophyll and caroten
Forest health worldwide is under pressure as a result of prolonged droughts.
In recent years, the Greater Horn of Africa has suffered from prolonged droughts, associated with forced migration and food and water security issues.
Detection and classification of objects with machine/deep learning for asset management in buildings
Asset management is important for commercial and public buildings.
The challenge of this topic is to detect a change or trend on top of seasonal fluctuations.
Data (of any kind) relating to geographic entities such as municipalities, provinces or countries (which may be available for different moments in time), can be represented through maps, but also t
ITC research staff from the GIP, PGM and NRS departments, in collaboration with CRIB have developed global maps that estimate
With the increasing availability of remotely sensed data, there is a pressing need to develop efficient and scalable methods for converting satellite images into useful information.
Clouds usually represent a big problem for optical remote sensing. A wide range of works have been developed in producing efficient cloud detection algorithms.
Clouds usually represent a big problem for optical remote sensing.
The digital twin (DT) (smart city/3D modelling) topic currently attracts the attention and interest of many cities, authorities, industrial and research organizations at national, European and inte
Concept: Kerala is highly prone to variety of natural hazards, such as cyclones, flood, landslides, drought and heatwaves.
Urban systems consist of multiple interrelated components that include both physical and social stru
Drought has wreaked havoc to human societies throughout history. Drought is usually caused by a multitude of factors starting from the deficit of precipitation when compared to climatic mean.
For Orisha, India, the Forages-group is building a comprehensive geo-database of imagery and agricultural (land-use) statistics.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used within a Mobile Edge Computation (MEC) network where the UAV is made intelligent by
Earth Observation data is increasingly important for how cities function and are accessible to inhabitants.
Understanding the types of vegetation that composes the land cover on non-anthropic areas and the land use for anthropic areas is essential to understand ecosystems dynamics and the impacts of huma
Understanding the types of vegetation that composes the land cover on non-anthropic areas and the land use for anthropic areas is essential to understand e
The circular economy action plan issued by EU in 2020 is a key feature towards Sustainable Development, promoting all type of strategies for regional
Unsafe houses and natural hazards are increasingly common threats for citizens of low-income countries.
The past decades have seen rapid advancements in space-based monitoring of essential water cycle variables, providing products related to precipitation, evapotranspiration, and so
ET is the water lost to the atmosphere through plant stomata during photosynthesis and from the surface following a wetting event.
Mediterranean and temperate forests are being affected by intense and frequent droughts that will become mo
Understory vegetation is an important component in forest ecosystems not only because of its
Urban environmental planning and management, both in theory and practice, have indicated the need for participatory inclusivity as much as possible.
Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges that our society faces today and the current loss of biodiversity caused by human actions is re
Thermal remote sensing is a type of passive remote sensing since that detects naturally emitted radiation. Most thermal remote sensing for vegetation conducted in the 8-14 μm wavelengths.
The use of printed satellite and aerial images for spatial data collection has been prevalent in many participatory geography approaches.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used by public and private organizations such as the Politie, Brandweer or Rijkswatersta
UN-Habitat estimates that over one billion people around the world live in slums, which are often located in hazard-prone areas.
Geothermal systems are one of the sustainable sources of our future energy mix.
The phenomenon of urban heat islands generally refers to the heating of urban areas compared to their undeveloped surroundings.
In the past few years, unexpected disruptions such as the Ukraine war and the global pandemic reveal the fact that our food systems are highly connected an
Forest health worldwide is increasingly deteriorated by droughts.
With down-looking satellite sensors, our three-dimensional (3D) world is commonly represented with 2D remote sensing images.
Frequent persistent drought events in Mediterranean ecosystems and insect attack have generated an extreme
Water resource management needs to consider a wide range of spatial scales and address a variety of problems, e.g.
Origin-Destination (OD) flow maps are a popular topic in contemporary cartographic and GIS research because they may show interesting spatio-temporal patterns, but are difficult to render legibly.
Deep learning algorithms can achieve great accuracies, but there are also concerns about biases and generalizability to unseen data.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are powerful flexible monitoring devices, and their data is increasingly us
The so-called Right to Light in Great Britain, the European standard EN 17037 “Daylight in Buildings”, and similar design codes or standards of good practice provide recommendations for ensuring th
Sustainable production of food and other biomass-derived products needs checking if, indeed, no harm is done to biodiversity, our environment in general, or to people.
Improving health and health care services are government priorities worldwide.
Climate data will be used to assess heat risks.
This study aims to develop methods that can be used to delineate pollution events.
Catastrophic natural disasters present formidable challenges to build resilient communities.
Access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services and associated health benefits are widely enjoyed in high-income countries , where centuries of investment in infrastruct
Raw materials are economically and strategically important for society, and an explosion in demand is predicted for many raw materials be
Normally, building digital twins are based on data collected beforehand from one sensor mounted on an aerial or ground platform.
The current trend of COVID-19 epidemic threatens to decimate populations even in advance countries.
Deep learning algorithms have gained increasing popularity in remote sensing due to their accuracy.
Individuals and the organisations in which they work need to cooperate in projects and research to withstand an increasing competition.
Understanding of the effect of climate change on ecosystems is of great importance.
This thesis topic wants to explore how the design of public spaces can facilitate social interaction, and how ICTs can be used to i
Improved quality of life is one of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) underlined sectors to be incorporated "in every urban development or renewal policy and
Improved quality of life is one of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) underlined sectors to be incorporated "in every urban development or renewal policy and strategy" (UN-Habitat, 2017).
Increased food security has a special attention for many land administration interventions.
The urban space is a place of intersecting struggles and opportunities.
Indoor scene understanding is important for tasks like indoor navigation and semantic mapping.
In the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), the advancement of large language models (LLM) like GPT-4, the base model of ChatGPT, has revolutionized natural language processing.
The digital twin (DT) (smart city/3D modelling) topic currently attracts the attention and interest of many cities, authorities, industrial and research organizations at national, European and inte
Impervious surfaces are the Earth’s surfaces covered with mainly anthropogenic and artificial structures, such as built-up areas, roads and streets, and parking lots.
Interactive Planning Support Systems (IPSS) implemented on a maptable are a promising way to involve professional stakeholders as well as citizens in participatory planning processes.
A workflow is considered to be a combination of data and (software) operations.
Climate change and migration are understood to have a complex relationship.
Urban slum is often vulnerable to environmental changes such as subsidence, as it has densely populated inf
Spanish PAZ, which was launched in February 2018, offers co-polarimetric (with HH and VV channel) SAR images with X-band and (down to) 11 days repeat cycle.
Sufficient nutrition remains a major challenge for rural households in the Sub-saharan region of Africa.
This project will have the student build multi-globe visualizations in one or more mediums: on desktop computer screens, in virtual reality or augmented reality.
The arid and semi-arid Lands (ASALs) of northern Kenya are characterized by extremes of poverty and c
Soundscape ecology is a developing research field where interactions between sounds and the environment are studied.
As a result of hardware miniaturization and ubiquitous internet access, there is a wealth of user- and sensor-generated geographic content available, from social media activity to private weather s
Being freely available, weather- and sunlight-independent, Copernicus Sentinel-1 data are increasingly being used for a variety of remote sensing applications.
Information on the spatial distribution of crops is of great importance for the sustainable management and development of agricultural practices and thus for national and global economic developmen
Humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross Red Crecent and Unicef use risk models to identify vulnerable populations and mitigate the affects of natural disasters.
Utilities form the essential infrastructure of a contemporary society, fulfilling fundamental requirements for both residents and industries.
The Mekong Delta in Vietnam experiences serious problems due to coastal erosion.
Recently, mortality and reduction in forest stand densities for Brutia pine (Pinus brutia) h
The Brazilian cerrado biome is under pressure, as an increasing part of it is converted to agriculture.
Crop mapping plays an important role in agronomic planning and management both for farmers and policymakers. Satellite remote sensing sensors have become efficient tools for mapping croplands.
The rate of carbon uptake by vegetation is not fully known.
Food insecurity is a big issue in eastern and southern Africa and projections are that this is going to get worse with climate change and variability.
Good access to resources and opportunities is essential for sustainable development. Improving
The moss species of Buxbaumia viridis is a rare moss species that lives mainly on dead wood that is in a hi
LINK TO RESEARCH PROJECTS
The MSc topics link to two ongoing larger research projects that allow being part of international research teams - both projects just started:
Mapping the presence or abundance of an animal or plant species is a non-trivial challenge. It often involves elaborate field surveys with strict data collection protocols and usually deep underst
Monitoring forest dynamics is essential for identifying the area most at risk for forest degradation and de
This topic is part of the ITC Space4Restoration project, which aims to develop remote sensing tools t
The topic can take several directions depending on the interest of the student.
A wide range of topics are available (See below).
Land use classification of urban area is one of the most important applications of remote sensing images. Urban management is generally in demand to account the dynamics of land uses.
Natural hazards such as debris flows, landslides or flooding often occur due to extreme hydrometeorological events.
UAVs are increasingly used to create 2D and 3D maps to support monitoring and emergency scenarios.
Objective
To develop a deep learning model to estimate the timing of phenological events over large area
Land administration in a modern and formal system is well defined with clear physical boundaries and legal aspects of a spatial unit, recorded in a proper database.
“Nature-based solutions” (NBS) or “building with nature” have received global attention as a multidimensional approach to reduce impacts of climate change and associated meteorological disaster ris
Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) stands as a category of neural networks adept at represent and render realistic 3D scenes environments using a set of 2D images.
The pursuit of economic growth, traditionally measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is increasingly being problematised for its effectiveness in enhancing societal well-being
Behind the many different data sources available to innovate geospatial technologies are large data infrastructures needed to produce and process geospatial data.
Palm oil is an important vegetable oil.
Human onchocerciasis (river blindness) is part of the so-called Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) that jointly affect more than one billion people living in impoverished communit
The impact of urban growth varies depending on whether it occurs within or beyond city boundaries.
Optimal performance of computations is one important promise that databases make to their user community.
Promoting disaster preparedness and resilience by co-developing stakeholder support tools for managing the systemic risk of compounding disasters.
So far, more than 6.5 million people have died from COVID-19, and still, there are around 1000 deaths per day.
Hyperspectral images are, amongst others, used for mineral mapping of drill cores, mapping hydrothermal alteration zones, and searching for mineralog
Urban green spaces can provide a lot of benefits to residents, including fresh and cool air, protection from flooding or space to meet others or do s
Food packaging is responsible for 5.4% of global food systems emissions in 2015 (Crippa et al.,
As an essential part of food security, diet diversity often requires frequent household food security surveys to monitor.
Farmers, agronomists, private enterprise and policy-makers need to know field conditions with sufficient early-warning.
In cities, temperatures are often higher than in the surrounding areas and can also vary locally.
The volume of pollen produced by trees differs from year to year. Especially beach and oak trees have mast years.
As a result of hardware miniaturization and ubiquitous internet access, there is a wealth of user- and sensor-generated geographic content available, from social media activity to private weather s
The goal of this study, as part of the larger BIOSPACE project, is to map and model leaf and canopy nitrogen content and their spatial va
The goal of this study, as part of the larger BIOSPACE project, is to map and model Specific Leaf Area (SLA) and its spatial variation in
New and affordable sensors (e.g., Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, Sensebox) have greatly increased the potential to collect finer-grained environmental information, especially on topics impacting on hum
The concept of nature conservation as well as ecosystem sustainability has received substantial attention of the human society, such is even more so recently given the dire IPCC warning about the a
Many land administration and spatial planning organizations are undergoing processes of digitalization of their spatial data holdings, communication networks, and work flows.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide excellent opportunities for more efficient and detailed infrastructure monitoring.
This project aims to explore using monocular cameras in the real-time construction of 3D scene graphs in outdoor applications.
In this project, we plan to address the problem of reasoning the visual question answering process when predicting the answers to the given image/question pairs.
The impacts of extreme heat are deadly, on the rise globally, and preventable.
Regional prediction and forecasting of crop yield is important for analyzing food security and
In the past couple of years, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) [1] and methods derived from it have become a popular choice for solving different tasks s
Amazingly, the Dutch nature conservation monitoring system makes very little use of remote sensing.
Urban planning issues and processes prescribe a collaboration of various stakeholders, which is nowadays often supported by planning support tools.
About 75% of the Earth’s land surface has been altered and land use change has affected more th
Global Navigation Satellitye Systems (GNSS) receivers are commonly used as a positioning tool, but these are negatively degraded by reflected signals from nearby objects from bu
Background
Visceral leishmaniasis (VL), also known as kala-azar, is a deadly parasitic
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have found significant applications in road monitoring, offering a versatile and efficient solution for infrastructur
In many countries, shortage of drinking water is a problem.
Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) data from Sentinel-1 satellites provides unprecedented opportunity to evaluate inter-annual flood characteristics, although consen
This study aims to assess the applicability of satellite rainfall estimates (SRE) in crop growth modelling by means of the Aquacrop model.
Spanish PAZ, which was launched in February 2018, offers co-polarimetric (with HH and VV channel) SAR images with X-band and (down to) 11 days repeat cycle.
Data acquired from indoor environments contains a lot of valuable information about the assets and facilities.
Our environment affects our health.
To inform policymakers about the agricultural landscapes and food production, accurate and timely monitoring of crop type is required.
Primary production is the growth or accumulated rate of biomass in plants.
ITC has been supporting UN-Habitat, the United Nations organization for urban development, since 2011 with the development and implementation of a regional urban planning approach
Mapping slums in different urban environments across the Globe is extremely important for locating and prioritizing hotspots of urban poor for urgent climate action to combat the impact of cl
The current trend of COVID-19 epidemic threatens to decimate populations even in advance countries.
The mechanism by which we observe a phenomenon that unfolds in space and time fundamentally determines what we can learn about that phenomenon.
Food packaging is responsible for 5.4% of global food systems emissions in 2015 (Crippa et al., 2021).
Disaster risk is overall well understood, and many methods exist for risk analysis, decision support for risk reduction actions, and early warning, and to a lesser extent for early acti
The accurate prediction of crop yields is a critical element in ensuring global food security, managing agricultural markets and supporting the decision-making processes of farmers and
For a skyscraper to be stable, it must be built on a strong foundation. However, several factors such as persistent use, aging and deterioration, etc.
The growing public health concerns about ambient air quality such as particulate matter (PM) concentrations suggest the need for a holistic monitoring to guide interventions.
The new Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, launched in December 2022, aims to map Earth's water in unprecedented detail to help manage climate change and to shar
Geo-referenced time series are data describing the time-changing behavior of one or more attributes at fixed locations and consistent time intervals [1].
The goal of sustainable transport is to promote better and healthier ways for individuals and communities to meet their travel needs while reducing the negative social, environmental and economic i
A huge task is waiting to realize the global agenda in relation to tenure security as recognized by the sustainable development goals (SDGs) set by the UN.
Thermal remote sensing is a type of passive remote sensing that detects naturally emitted radiation.
Most of what we know about the internal structure of the Earth (and other rocky planets and moons) comes from the study of seismic waves and other ge
The world’s human population has been tripled during the past 70 years, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.7 billion now (UN-Habitat).
Increasingly frequent extreme weather events have a major impact on agriculture and pose a threat to sustainable food production.
Although large language models (LLM) have been around for a while, the public release of ChatGPT demonstrated a quantum leap in the abilities of these models to respond to natural
Daily totals or daily averages are convenient to work with and provide a first, rough impression of the wea
GLOFAS is an ensemble of 3 components: A Metrological Model and Forecast (Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) forecasts of the ECMWF IFS), A hydrological model (LISFLOOD) and a web
Despite the proven effectiveness of early warning early action in reducing disaster impacts and saving lives, around one-third of the glo
Tsunamis caused by landslides flank collapses and pyroclastic density currents during or after an eruption are cascading hazards that could hav
The creation of 3D models of objects like buildings and other man-made structures is an important field of applications for city modelling, urban planning, cultural heritage, and many other a
The fusion of UAV-based and satellite-based data has emerged as a powerful approach for plant health monitoring in agriculture.
Unmanned aircraft UAVs are mostly used for surveying in the architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector because of their compact size, ease of movement, and the quantity of data
When infrastructure companies refurbish asphalt, a road-marking inventory needs to be created in advance to allow for accurate road marking replacement.
Droughts are exacerbated by climate change, which makes them more frequent, prolonged, and catastrophic.
The Netherlands is a county filled with river systems, the protection of susceptible areas depends on our understanding of the likelihoods of flood occurin
The droughts of 2018-2020 in the Netherlands created great social distress, induced huge economic damages in agricultural production, disrupted river navigation and damaged buildi
The recent 2018-2020 drought events that occurred in the Netherlands were considered as extremes, creating great social and economic damage in agriculture production.
Climate change is nowadays prominently present on the political and thus scientific agenda, which is reflected in the Dutch Delta-Programme for Spatial Adaptation (“Delta-Programma Ruimtelijke Adap
Student will use earth observation based data and techniques to understand urban socioeconomic patterns, and attempt to interpret these patterns by using physical metrics of urban morphology obtain
Interactive computational notebooks are browser-based tools that support shared workflows, coding, data, and visualisations.
Understanding the hydrologic and energy cycles to enhance our meteorological and hydrologica
Explore how to enhance field exploration using our local environment with the digital tools available.
To develop a model to estimate the timing of phenological events over large areas from time series of earth observation data using vision transformers, a fierce alternative to tra
Water level in lakes and rivers is a critical parameter to monitor for water managers. It captures the state of surface waters, and, if placed strategically, can be used in e.g.
More and more cities are developing digital twins of their crucial public infrastructures.
Concept: Nipah, a deadly viral disease is confined only to a small pocket of Kerala.
Glaciers store majority of the freshwater found in our planet.