John Trinder – Director

John Trinder graduated from UNSW with a BSurv (1963), MSc (1965) at ITC in The Netherlands, and PhD from UNSW (1972). He was employed at the School of Surveying and SIS at University of NSW from 1965 to 1999, progressing to the position of Professor in 1991 and Head of School from 1990-1999. He is currently Emeritus Professor in that School.

John has undertaken teaching and research at UNSW for about 45 years, specializing in a range of topics in spatial information, and has published more than 160 scientific papers in journals and conference proceedings. He has received several awards with the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing for research papers published in their journal, Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing. John research interests include: the determination of DEMs from interferometric SAR and lidar; the fusion of discrete lidar and image data for extraction of objects required for mapping, incorporating probability approaches, such as the Dempster-Shafer algorithm; machine learning techniques such as neural networks, classification trees and support vector machines. As well, he is directing research on the extraction of forest characteristics from remotely sensed data and studies of the interaction of lidar pulses with vegetation.

He has held a number of executive positions in the Council of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), including Treasurer from 1992-1996, Secretary General from 1996-2000, President from 2000-2004, First Vice President from 2004-2008 and is an Honorary Member of ISPRS.

He was awarded the Spatial Sciences Institute’s Eminent Persons Award in Australia in 2004.