PhD - Unlocking historical aerial image archive for understanding environmental changes

Your responsibilities

• Developing and implementing research questions.
• Testing new photogrammetric pipelines (e.g., Knuth et al., 2023; Maiwald et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2021) for processing historical aerial images using commercial and open-source solutions.

Sensitivity study with Trimetrogon flights or other available data aiming at improving our understanding of the impact of photogrammetric processing on the DEM quality.

Implementation of solutions for correcting image distortion introduced during the scanning processing and storage.

• Applying the photogrammetric processing pipeline to reconstruct DEM time series from different datasets. Quantify the accuracy and uncertainty of the generated DEMs to assess the significance of detected changes.
• Develop DEM time series methods analysis to extract elevation change information and analyse changes over time, including machine learning approaches.
• Image deep learning segmentation for characterising surface landcover and landcover changes.
• Presentation of research results at conferences and publishing results in peer-reviewed journals.
• Contribution to the teaching of remote sensing courses.
• Close collaboration with research partners at the University of Zurich, University of Magallanes, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), University of Toulouse, and TU Wien.

Your profile

You have completed a M.Sc. degree in photogrammetry, remote sensing, computer vision, physical geography, earth systems science, physics, or related fields.

A strong interest and possibly some experience in image processing, photogrammetry, computer vision, and change detection analysis is expected.

Very good skills in processing and analysing geospatial data and advanced programming and computational skills (e.g., Python) are required.

Experience and interest in cryosphere processes are welcome. You have very good written and spoken English and are willing to interact with an interdisciplinary science community.

Knowing German is an additional asset but not required

What we offer

The team will be built on the values of collaboration, diversity, respect, initiative, and open science. The drivers of the research group are sharing experiences, ideas, and approaches, learning from each other, and returning what we have learned to the group and the community.

We offer a 4-year PhD full position (with internal evaluation after one year). All doctoral candidates will be members of UZH's and thus benefit from a comprehensive training program and extensive support measures, including the possibility to spend a period abroad.

We offer outstanding working conditions, a high quality of life in Zurich, excellent support and a flexible work environment that fosters collaboration and teamwork.