Alper Yılmaz

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, 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. 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.

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). 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.

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). 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

Book chapters and reference works