Plenary Lecture

Parameter Estimation on Manifolds

Professor Dr. Karlheinz Spindler
Fachhochschule Wiesbaden
Kurt-Schumacher-Ring 18
D - 65197 Wiesbaden
Germany
Email: SpindlerGG@web.de

Abstract: The talk will present various engineering applications which lead to the problem of estimating parameters on manifolds: calibration of camera and detection systems, spacecraft attitude determination, optical navigation in spacecraft operations, signal processing algorithms. While estimating constrained parameters is a common engineering task, this task is not always executed using a proper statistical treatment. It will be shown how classical algorithms can be properly adapted to the new framework and how the use of some basic differential geometric ideas can substantially enhance the performance of parameter estimation schemes used in practice.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Karlheinz Spindler is currently Professor of Mathematics and Data Processing at the Fachhochschule Wiesbaden in Germany. He received his academic training at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt (Germany), earning a doctorate in mathematics there, and then taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (USA). He also worked for five years at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), the control centre of the European Space Agency (ESA) located in Darmstadt, Germany. His research interests include control theory and parameter estimation with an emphasis on differential geometric methods.