SPARK Challenge : SPAcecraft Recognition leveraging Knowledge of Space Environment

Submit your papers

ICIP 2021 will have proceedings for the SPARK Grand Challenge.

The deadline for paper submissions is 20 July 2021.

Please follow this link and submit your papers under “Submit Results Manuscript” or directly through this link

For templates and guidelines, please refer to this link.

Schedule

19-22 September 2021: Announcement of winners (At ICIP)

Sponsorship & Awards

The SPARK Challenge is sponsored by LiftMeOff (LMO). LMO is a UK & Luxembourg business developing Propulsion and Space Situational Awareness subsystems for the NewSpace and In-Orbit Servicing markets.

LMO will award a total cash amount of 1kEUR that will be split as follows:

🏆 1st place: 700EUR
🏆 2nd place: 300EUR

The team behind the Challenge

This challenge is proposed by two research teams: (1) from academia, namely, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), at the University of Luxembourg (UL), and (2) from industry, namely, LMO a space technology start-up whose goal is to encourage a safe and sustainable growth in space by providing the necessary solutions in the field of satellite autonomy and reusability. LMO’s key focus lies in technologies based around Propulsion and Computer Vision.

The organising team is composed of a balanced group of 6 people. The group is a mixture of senior and junior researchers with both academic and industrial experiences, and a good female representation (33%). The team is presented below:

Djamila Aouada

leads the Computer Vision, Imaging and Machine Intelligence (CVI2) research group at the Interdisciplinary 4Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT) of the University of Luxembourg. She received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2009 from North Carolina State University (NCSU). She has worked as a consultant for major research laboratories, i.e., LANL, Bell Labs., MERL. Her research interests include 3D shape modelling, RGB-D data enhancement, and multi-sensor fusion. She is the co-author of four IEEE best paper awards. Prof. Aouada is an IEEE Senior Member. She has served as Chair of the IEEE Benelux Women in Engineering Affinity Group (2014 – 2016), Chair of the SHApe Recovery from Partial textured 3D scans (SHARP) Workshop and Challenge in 2020 and in 2021, in conjunction with ECCV 2020, and CVPR 2021, respectively. She has also served as Area Chair at the 2020 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) and is the Program Chair at 3DV 2021.

djamila.aouada(at)uni.lu

Michel Poucet

is an ex-rocket scientist turned entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience in the space industry. He holds a Master in Space engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, in Italy together with an MBA from the Vlerick Business School in Belgium. Today he is CEO and one of the founders of Lift Me Off (LMO). LMO is a UK & Luxembourg business developing Propulsion and Space Situational Awareness subsystems for the NewSpace and In-Orbit Servicing markets.

m.poucet(at)liftmeoff.com

Marcos Damian Perez

is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Lift Me Off (LMO). He has received a 5BSc degree in Mechanical Engineering and a MSc degree in Engineering Sciences both from the Balseiro Institute (Argentina). Since then, he has worked for more than 10 years in the space industry specifically in the fields of Attitude and Orbit Control Systems (AOCS), Propulsion Subsystems and in the development of sensors for Space Situational Awareness (SSA), and has been directly involved in many missions from design to operation in space. His main fields of expertise are chemical propulsion subsystems and space optical sensors.

m.da.perez(at)liftmeoff.com

Enjie Ghorbel

is a Research Associate at SnT and a member of the Computer Vision, Imaging and Machine Intelligence (CVI2) research group, University of Luxembourg. She received her PhD degree in computer vision in 2017 from the University of Normandie (France) and the Institute Mines-T´el´ecom Lille-Douai (France). She obtained her engineering diploma in Computer Science in 2014 from the ENISo (Tunisia). Her current research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition and medical imaging.

enjie.ghorbel(at)uni.lu

Vincent GAUDILLIERE

Vincent GAUDILLIERE is a Research Associate at SnT and a member of the Computer Vision, Imaging and Machine Intelligence (CVI2) research group, University of Luxembourg. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Lorraine, France, in 2020. His PhD research was carried out at the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria). His research interests are in computer vision, focusing on object pose estimation and object-based camera pose estimation, through the use of object modeling and analytical geometry.

Vincent.gaudilliere(at)uni.lu

Mohamed Adel Musallam

is a 2nd year industrial PhD student in the CVI2 research group at SnT, working under the supervision of Prof. Djamila Aouada, in collaboration with LMO. Mohamed received his Master’s degree in computer vision from the University of Burgundy Franche-Comt´e (France), in 2019. His research interests are in Computer Vision and Deep Learning focusing on object recognition, pose estimation, and space situational awareness.

mohamed.adel(at)uni.lu

Kassem Al Ismaeil

is a Research Associate at SnT. Kassem has received the BSc degree in electronic engineering and the MSc degree in computer science both from the University of Aleppo, Aleppo, Syria, in 2006 and 2008, respectively. He received the MSc degree in computer vision and robotics from the University of Burgundy, Le Creusot, France, in 2011, and the PhD degree in computer science from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, in 2015. Later on, Kassem has joined the MunichRe group as an IT project manager where he was managing the middleware system implementation. His research interests include 3D computer vision, image and video processing, machine learning, with a focus on depth super-resolution, 3D reconstruction, and structure from motion.

kassem.alismaeil(at)uni.lu