Alper Yilmaz

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Alper Yilmaz is a computer scientist and photogrammetric engineer. He is a professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State University, where he holds a courtesy appointment in computer science and engineering and directs the Photogrammetric Computer Vision Laboratory. His research spans photogrammetry, computer vision, machine learning and geospatial intelligence, and he is known for his work on visual object tracking.

Yilmaz served as editor-in-chief of Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, the journal of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS), from 2016 to 2024, and was president of Technical Commission II (Photogrammetry) of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS).

Education

Yilmaz received a BS in computer science and engineering from Yıldız Technical University in 1997 and an ME in computer engineering from Istanbul Technical University in 1999. He then moved to the United States, earning an MS (2001) and a PhD (2004) in computer science from the University of Central Florida, where his doctoral advisor was Mubarak Shah.

Career

After a period as a visiting assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida (2004–2006), Yilmaz joined Ohio State University in 2006 as an assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering. He was promoted to professor in 2017 and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

At Ohio State he directs the Photogrammetric Computer Vision Laboratory (PCVLab). He has supervised more than 20 completed doctoral dissertations.

Yilmaz was editor-in-chief of Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, the journal of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, from 2016 to 2024, succeeding Russell G. Congalton. He served as president of ISPRS Technical Commission II (Photogrammetry) from 2022 to 2026; under the society's bylaws, commission presidents are confirmed for the four-year period between successive congresses. Under the ISPRS statutes, the scientific work of the society is the responsibility of its technical commissions, which are autonomous in scientific matters; commission presidents are nominated by the society's national member organizations and confirmed by vote of its General Assembly, in which the delegates of national member organizations hold the voting rights.

In addition to the Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing editorship, Yilmaz served as an associate editor of Computer Vision and Image Understanding (2014–2016) and Machine Vision and Applications (2006–2011).

Research

Yilmaz's most cited work is the 2006 survey "Object tracking: A survey", written with Omar Javed and Mubarak Shah and published in ACM Computing Surveys, which organized the visual tracking literature into a taxonomy of point, kernel and silhouette tracking methods, and is among the most cited articles in the visual tracking literature. His subsequent research has addressed vision-based navigation for unmanned platforms in GPS-denied environments, geospatial machine learning for scene understanding, and anomaly detection in multidimensional sensor data. He is an inventor on several granted United States patents in geolocalization and image-based analysis.

Honors and awards

Yilmaz received the ASPRS Photogrammetric (Fairchild) Award in 2025. He was elected a Fellow of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing in 2021, and is a member of the National Academy of Inventors (2020) and a senior member of the IEEE (2013). His other recognitions include ASPRS Outstanding Service Awards (2022, 2025), the ASPRS Presidential Citation (2019), a Certificate of Recognition from ISPRS (2026), and a special prize (特別賞) of the Masao Horiba Award from Horiba, Ltd. of Japan (2016).

At Ohio State, he was named University Innovator of the Year in 2020 and received the College of Engineering's Lumley Research Award (2012) and Lumley Interdisciplinary Research Award (2015).

Selected publications

Articles

• Yilmaz, Alper; Javed, Omar; Shah, Mubarak (2006). "Object tracking: A survey". ACM Computing Surveys. 38 (4). doi:10.1145/1177352.1177355.
• Yilmaz, Alper; Shah, Mubarak (2004). "Contour-based object tracking with occlusion handling in video acquired using mobile cameras". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 26 (11): 1531–1536. doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2004.96.
• Li, Qipeng; Zhuang, Yuan; Huai, Jianzhu; Chen, Yiwen; Yilmaz, Alper (2024). "An efficient point cloud place recognition approach based on transformer in dynamic environment". ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. 207: 14–26. doi:10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2023.11.013.
• Yusefi, Abdullah; Durdu, Akif; Yilmaz, Alper; Sungur, Cemil; Bozkaya, Furkan; Tığlıoğlu, Şeyda; Alver, Veli (2023). "A generalizable D-VIO and its fusion with GNSS/IMU for improved autonomous vehicle localization". IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. doi:10.1109/TIV.2023.3316361.
• Yang, Luming; Liu, Hong; Calanche, A.; Gokcek, S.; Singh, V.; Sansoterra, N.; Akkaya, M.; Akkaya, B.; Yilmaz, Alper (2025). "Disrupting explicit encoding paradigms: property-interactive transformers decode TCR specificity beyond dataset biases". Briefings in Bioinformatics. doi:10.1093/bib/bbaf609.

Book chapters and reference works

• Porikli, Fatih; Yilmaz, Alper (2012). "Object tracking". In Shan, Caifeng; Porikli, Fatih; Xiang, Tao; Gong, Shaogang (eds.). Video Analytics for Business Intelligence. Springer. ISBN 978-3-642-28597-4.
• Yilmaz, Alper (2011). "Detecting and tracking the action content". In Salah, Albert Ali; Gevers, Theo (eds.). Computer Analysis of Human Behavior. Springer. pp. 41–68. ISBN 978-0-85729-993-2.
• Yilmaz, Alper (2009). "Active contours: Snakes". In Wah, Benjamin W. (ed.). Wiley Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering. Vol. 1. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-38393-2.

References

External links

• Photogrammetric Computer Vision Laboratory