RIT Open Community eXperiment 2025

There is a continual need for well ground-truthed remote sensing data collections. As new modalities, platforms, and sensors are deployed, it is important to develop data sets with ground-truth for research and education purposes.

In the spring of 2024, RIT began planning for a major data collection activity coined the RIT Open Community eXperiment (ROCX) with the following objectives:

• Acquire remote sensing data for research purposes from a variety of sensor modalities and platforms coordinated over a defined area for a defined period.
• Include a range of ground object deployments and ground-truth collection activities proposed and carried out by research experiment Principal Investigators.
• Process and distribute analysis-ready data sets on an open-access data repository for use by the general remote sensing research community.
• Disseminate research results from the collection through special sessions at major conferences and peer-reviewed journal special issues.

The activity culminated in an intense experiment period from September 4–22, 2025. From June 2024 through September 2025, 28 online Working Group meetings were held, with participants sharing ideas and plans for the collection. Two open periods were held in late 2024 and early 2025 to solicit proposals for data collections and ground experiments.

During the experiment period, 75 participants from 24 organizations and six countries came to the Tait Preserve to set up ground experiments and collect data. Data were acquired for 19 ground experiments by 14 ground instruments, eight UAV platforms, two airplanes, and seven satellite platforms. The table below provides a summary of the data collections during ROCX 2025.

ROCX 2025 was supported by Platinum sponsors IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society and Bronze sponsors Matter Intelligence and Spectra Vista Corporation. Many thanks to these organizations for their support.