Besides teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels, I conduct research on digital image analysis and computer vision, through both classic and deep learning approaches. 

I have experience with color, multi- and hyperspectral images involving applications such as large scale systematic production of landuse/landcover maps from remote sensing images, content based retrieval, industrial inspection, water quality estimation from Sentinel 2 images, night-time real-time vehicle detection and tracking, plant recognition, weed/crop classification for precision agriculture, fruit and crowd counting, pollen recognition from microscopy images, various (bio)medical applications, and more.

Contact

• Address: Sabanci University, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Office #1108, Orta Mahalle - Tuzla, 34956, Istanbul, Türkiye

• Tel: +90 216 483 95 14

• E-mail: erchan.aptoula_at_sabanciuniv.edu 

News

• Nov 2024 - New conference paper at IEEE WHISPERS on domain generalization for scene classification, see you at Finland in December!

• Nov 2024 - New conference paper at SPIE Photonics on the optimization of asymmetrical helix micromixers.

• Nov 2024 - A new bilateral project between Türkiye and Tunisia has been accepted on explainable medical image analysis, led by Prof. B. Yanıkoğlu, where I'm tasked as a researcher on domain adaptation and generalization.

• Sep 2024 - New journal article at IEEE GRSL about histogram layers for semantic segmentation with İlter Türkmenli and Prof. Koray Kayabol.

• Jul 2024 - Two papers at IGARSS'24 by MSc students Efkan Durakli and Furkan Gül.

• May 2024 - New EU Project: X-CITE, a collaboration with Tampereen Kaupunki (Finland), Nokia Technologies (Finland), Vlaamse Gewest (Belgium), Cegeka (Belgium), Gemeente Rotterdam (Netherlands), Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, BITES, and more.

• February 2024 - New project on domain generalization for remote sensing with 1 PhD and 2 MSc fully funded positions (scholarship and accommodation) starting this spring. Contact me for details.

• January 2024 - CFP: special issue on Recent Advances in Analytics and Learning of Hyperspectral Images at the Journal of Franklin Institute - Submission Link, deadline 31/3/24

• November 2023 - The Spring 2024 Call of Graduate Applications will remain open until December 1st. Application Link

• October 2023 - There is a fully funded position for a MSc student at Sabanci University on the topic of keyword spotting from centuries-old handwritten Ottoman documents. Contact me for details. 

• June 2023 - I made a presentation about domain adaptation and domain generalization in the Machine Learning Summer School co-organized by Sabanci and Istanbul Technical Universities. Many thanks to the organizers Uğur Behçet Töreyin and Onur Varol for their invitation. Here are the slides (in Turkish) - link.

• June 2023 - I was kindly hosted by the School of Computer Science of the University of Lincoln, UK (Laboratory of Vision Engineering) where I provided a couple of presentations on remote sensing and deep domain adaptation. Many thanks to Petra Bosilj, Simon Parsons and Xujiong Ye - Presentation1 Presentation2.

• April 2023 - A webinar about the use of technology and remote sensing in particular for disaster management by B. Yanikoglu, I. Tekin and E. Aptoula (in Turkish) LINK 

• April 2023 - Our joint paper on explainable AI for remote sensing with D. E. Turan, G. Taşkın and A. Ertürk has been accepted to IEEE IGARSS'23.

• February 2023 - I've been elevated to Senior Member status of IEEE.

• January 2023 - The joint study on a domain generalized fully convolutional single stage detector has been accepted to IEEE ICRA'23. Congratulations to Karthik Seemakurthy, Charles Fox and Petra Bosilj from the University of Lincoln.

• January 2023 - I'm happy to announce that I have been appointed as an Associate Editor for the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing Journal.

• November 2022 - Our joint paper with the University of Lincoln on domain generalization for object detection has been accepted to AAAI'23. Congratulations to Karthik Seemakurthy, Charles Fox and Petra Bosilj!

• September 2022 - News flash, I'm now employed at the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences of Sabanci University. 

• March 2022 - Our article with P. Bosilj, T. Duckett and G. Cielniak on transfer learning between crop types for segmantic segmentation was recognized as a top cited paper!

• February 2022 - I gave a talk about the advances on deep domain adaptation for remote sensing in the context of the Sensing Anywhere Event. Here are the SLIDES. 

• January 2022 - CALL FOR PAPERS for a special session at ICPRAI'21: Analysis and learning of multi-variate, multi-temporal, multi-resolution and multi-source remote sensing data Extended Final Deadline: January 31st, 2022!

•  December 2021 - MSc student Melike Ilteralp's first article has been published. Congratulations! - PDF 

•  December 2021 - I have been notified that I have received the Young Scientist Award from the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA). Yay!

•  November 2021 - I made it to the top 2% of the international science-wide author database of standardized citation indicators in terms of career-long impact, according to J. Ioannides et al. (2021) -LINK.

• July 2021 - CALL FOR PAPERS: Where AI Meets Food Security: Intelligent Approaches to Climate-Aware Agriculture (WAIF) in the context of AAAI'21. Website The deadline is on August 13th!

• June 2021 - CALL FOR PAPERS: The 2022 IEEE Mediterranean and Middle East Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (M2GARSS) will be organized online. The website is ready! Same scientific quality as IEEE IGARSS but at a lower registration fee! 

•  December 2020 - New bilateral Turkey-Qatar project (Tubitak 2556): Intelligent Public Safety Platform for Smart Cities, jointly with Havelsan, Turkcell, Hyperion, IstLink, Tazi, Ozyegin Univ., Texas A&M Univ., Hamad Bin Khalifa Univ. and Informatica Qatar (2021-2024)

•  December 2020 - I made it to the top 2% of the international science-wide author database in terms of standardized citation indicators, according to J. Ioannides et al. (2020) - (Table S7). A nice little motivation boost :)

•  July 2020 - The water quality monitoring website for Lake Balik is online. It was prepared in the context of Tubitak Project 217E053. A deep regression network is in place processing Sentinel 2 data and calculating pollution maps with respect to various parameters. First of its kind in the country.