RIT Open Community eXperiment 2025

The Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing (DIRS) Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology is seeking remote sensing community participation in a large data collection experiment planned for September 2025. The goal is to acquire new data for research purposes building on previous successful DIRS coordinated experiments including SHARE 2010 and SHARE 2012.

During the spring and summer of 2024 an open survey was conducted for interest by potential collaboration partners and community participants. We received survey responses from over 60 individuals from more than 40 organizations expressing their interest in ROCX 2025. Of these, 43 individuals from 33 organizations agreed to be part of the ROCX 2025 Working Group which is actively planning details for the experiment. The survey is now closed and further inquiries can be directed to DIRS and will be handled on a case-by-case basis.

The ROCX 2025 Working Group is currently meeting bi-weekly to develop plans. Next steps include issuing a Call for Proposals from those expressing interest through the planning survey. The call will solicit plans to collect remote sensing and ground truth data, as well as conducting ground experiments. These proposals will be used to firm up ROCX 2025 data collection activities and specific experiment locations. We are targeting September 8-19, 2025 as the experiment time window.

February 6, 2025: Planning has continued with over 50 participants in the working group and continued growth in interest in ROCX 2025. We continue to plan for an experiment window of September 8 – 19 and have selected RIT’s Tait Preserve as the primary test site. An initial call for participant proposals in the fall yielded the following:

Data collection proposals

• Multiple commercial satellite hyperspectral imaging vendors
• A commercial UAV VNIR/SWIR hyperspectral imaging vendor
• RIT’s multimodal UAV systems (VNIR and SWIR hyperspectral imagers, lidar, multispectral, thermal)
• A commercial UAV magnetometry System (buried metal detection)

Ground experiment proposals

• Hyperspectral subpixel target lattices (~1 m in size with hundreds of pixels for cm-scale imaging from UAV)
• Night time visible point sources for imaging by Landsat and commercial satellites
• Thermal targets for DIRSIG simulation code validation
• Multiple calibration targets (e.g., panels, light sources, mirrors)
• Collection of high resolution point cloud photogrammetry of Tait Lodge
• Ground effluent target bags for gas concentration measurement

A second call for participation proposals is now open with a deadline of February 28, 2025. The call has been distributed to those who completed the interest survey. Any further inquiries should be sent to the ROCX Coordinators.

We also are excited to announce an opportunity for organizations to sponsor ROCX 2025. More information is available here. Please consider supporting this community experiment.