International Contest on Remote Sensing Data Processing towards Tree-level Forest Understanding

01 Jul 2025 - 31 Jul 2026
Wuhan, China

Background of the Event

International Contest on Remote Sensing Data Processing towards Tree-level Forest Understanding is a series event, aiming to promote the development of innovative solutions for remote sensing data processing. This event covers different topics in different years, e.g., different types of processing (pre-processing, thematic information extraction, scene understanding, etc.), methodologies (marching learning and deep learning), and data sources (static, mobile, drone, etc.).

The 1st event of this series was initialized in 2014, where 18 teams from 10+ countries participated. The result was published as a research paper in ISPRS journal and has been listed as an ESI highly cited paper ever since it was published.

Liang, X., Hyyppä, J., Kaartinen, H., Lehtomäki, M., Pyörälä, J., Pfeifer, N., Holopainen, M., Brolly, G., Francesco, P., Hackenberg, J., Huang, H., Jo, H.-W., Katoh, M., Liu, L., Mokroš, M., Morel, J., Olofsson, K., Poveda-Lopez, J., Trochta, J., Wang, D., Wang, J., Xi, Z., Yang, B., Zheng, G., Kankare, V., Luoma, V., Yu, X., Chen, L., Vastaranta, M., Saarinen, N., Wang, Y., 2018. International benchmarking of terrestrial laser scanning approaches for forest inventories. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 144, 137–179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2018.06.021

The 2nd contest is under preparation supported by the ISPRS Scientific Initiative 2025 and co-organized by the WGIII/1 Remote Sensing Data Processing and Understanding led by the applicant. It is planned to start to call for participating in Jul. 2025. The final outcome of this contest is planned to be released at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, considering the complexity of organizing the international contest, the ending time may be postponed, but no later than Jul., 2026.

This year’s topic is the Individual Tree Delineation (ITD) in forests from point cloud data. The contest has built an international collaboration network, including top scientists and teams. At this moment, the contest has collected data, i.e., raw point cloud data and annotations of individual trees, from Brazil, Finland, Italy, and China, through the network. The network is increasing as the event progresses. More data and more tracks may be added during the progress of the event.