Dr. John Kerekes of Rochester Inst of Technology

In the spring of 2024 the Carlson Center’s Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing (DIRS) Lab began planning for a major data collection activity coined RIT Open Community eXperiment (ROCX). The goal of ROCX was to collect remote sensing data together with ground truth for distribution to the community for education and research purposes. The planning culminated in an intense experiment period September 4 – 18, 2025 at the RIT Tait Preserve in Penfield, New York. Significant community interest resulted in 75 participants from 24 organizations and 6 countries participating on-site at their own expense with 20 ground experiments and 20 data collection efforts. During the experiment data were acquired by more than a dozen ground instruments, eight UAV platforms, two airplanes and at least six satellite platforms. Efforts are now underway to collect and curate the data for distribution on an open access website for use by the global remote sensing community. This presentation will provide an overview of ROCX and show examples of data collected. 

Biography:

Dr. Kerekes has worked throughout his career on advancing the state of the art and practice of remote sensing technology through theoretical investigations, data analyses, and modeling of remote sensing systems. His interest has been in viewing the end-to-end remote sensing process as a system with application performance as the system metric. Developing models with this perspective has improved understanding of parameter sensitivities and requirements for system design and operation. His work has emphasized the use of statistical parametric models in propagating the information bearing characteristics of the scene through the effects of the remote sensing process. He has applied this approach to the study of multispectral remote sensing systems designed for surface land cover classification, the vertical profiling of atmospheric temperature and water vapor, the sensing of surface particulate matter and for unresolved (sub-pixel) object detection and identification. He has also investigated the use of spectral imaging for medical applications.

Email:

Address:54 Lomb Memorial Drive, , Rochester, New York, United States, 14526