ISPRS Congress in Toronto, 4–11 July

I attended the XXV ISPRS Congress in Toronto, Canada, from 4–11 July 2026, together with Zhimeng He, a PhD student I co-supervise. It was a pleasure to share this conference experience with Zhimeng and see our group’s research represented in an international community spanning photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information science.

Our contributions included work on spatial intelligence in vision-language models, building detection and image super-resolution. Two papers from our group appeared in the ISPRS Annals, with Zhimeng contributing to both and leading the Cube Kernel paper:

From Super-Resolution to Superior Land-Cover Detection: Cross-Channel Attention Network for Aerial Images, by Yuwei Cai, Zhimeng He, Meiliu Wu and Brian Barrett. Paper.
Cube Kernel: A Novel Approach to Enable Local Gradient Flow Across Channels in CNNs, by Zhimeng He, Yuwei Cai, Meiliu Wu, X. Xian and Brian Barrett. Paper.

My warm thanks to the ISPRS Congress organising committee and session chairs for bringing the community together and creating such a welcoming setting for presentations and discussion. Thank you also to the colleagues who stopped to exchange ideas with us.

Congress website and proceedings

At the congress

A photograph at the ISPRS Congress backdrop — A moment to remember from ISPRS Congress 2026.

A research presentation at the ISPRS Congress — Sharing research during a congress session.

At the ISPRS 2026 poster session in Toronto — At the poster session, 8 July 2026, alongside my work on embedding geospatial intelligence into vision-language models.

Colleagues together in the ISPRS Congress auditorium — Catching up with colleagues at the congress.

Meiliu beside her poster on image geo-localisation and vision-language models — With my poster, Advancing Image Geo-localization by Embedding Geospatial Intelligence into Vision-Language Models.

A group photograph with Glasgow folks and colleagues at ISPRS Congress 2026 — Lovely to meet Glasgow folks and colleagues in Toronto!

Visiting the University of Toronto

During the trip, Zhimeng and I also visited the University of Toronto, hosted by Prof Jue Wang and Prof Michael J. Widener. We are very grateful to both hosts for their generous hospitality and the opportunity to discuss our research. The visit was a lovely addition to our time in Toronto.

Meiliu and Zhimeng with Prof Michael J. Widener during their University of Toronto visit — Zhimeng and me with Prof Michael J. Widener during our visit to the University of Toronto.

A photograph by the University of Toronto Department of Geography and Planning sign — A visit to the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography and Planning.

A photograph with a host by the Department of Geography and Planning sign — Thank you to Prof Jue Wang and Prof Michael J. Widener for hosting our visit.