For your submitted solution to the ClearSAR-Track 1 challenge to be eligible, the following rules need to be adhered to:

Time and duration

The ClearSAR Challenge, implemented by KP Labs, BV Labs, Telespazio UK and the ESA Φ-Lab, will take place online from 27 February 2026 to 13 May 2026 16:00 / 4 PM CEST.

Participants

Participants from all over the world can participate in the challenge. However, please refer to the Prizes section to verify whether you are eligible to receive a prize in your current location. You must be of legal age in your jurisdiction to participate.

Teams

Each participating team must designate a team leader, who will serve as the primary point of contact between the organisers and the team.

Participants are only allowed to join one team throughout the duration of the Challenge. Teams are not permitted to create duplicate or secondary entries. To ensure fairness and transparency, we kindly ask that participants from the same public organisation or private company form a single team.

If multiple teams from the same entity appear to be collaborating, the ESA Φ-lab Challenge organisers reserve the right to require them to merge into one team. This rule is in place to prevent unfair advantages and maintain a level playing field for all. If you are planning to join the Challenge with colleagues from your workplace or academic institution, please coordinate and register as one unified team per entity.

Note: In the case of large institutions (e.g., universities), it may not be feasible for all individuals to coordinate. If teams can demonstrate they are not cooperating, they may be exempt from this rule.

The organizing team reserves the right to decide on a case-by-case basis and to request the deletion of any duplicate registrations or submissions.

Creating and submitting a solution

For the challenge, you have access to the training and test datasets and a range of tools in the form of a Jupyter Notebook (Starter Pack). All usable data is hosted on the EOTDL. No other datasets might be used for the development of your solution. However, pre-trained models are allowed.

Participants are allowed to upload their solutions every 12 hours (to avoid overload and unfair behaviours). The final submission of your solution must be uploaded latest by 13 May 2026 (16:00 CEST / 4 PM CEST). Each valid submission must consist of the predictions (RFI bounding boxes), over all test examples. For more details on the submission format, see the Jupyter notebook (Starter Pack).

Challenge evaluation

The scoring of submitted solutions is performed by the organizers through the evaluation server. The final score is exclusively based on a quantitative evaluation.

Metrics

The score obtained by a Team is calculated using mean Average Precision (mAP), ranging from 0 to 1, with 1 indicating the perfect score.

Leaderboards

A public leaderboard lets you see and compare your current performance in relation to other teams’ submissions. A private leaderboard will be disclosed at the end of the competition (at IEEE ICIP 2026), and it will be used for the final ranking.

Reproducibility check

Once the challenge has been closed (on May 13, 2026), we will ask the top-performing teams (up to 10), with the highest mAP scores over the entire test set, to submit their methods for the reproducibility check. In this phase, the organizers will verify the reproducibility of the methods developed by the participants of the ClearSAR Challenge.

Please note that, if the solution turns out to be not reproducible, or if any concerns about its validity arises, the organisers reserve the right to contact the team leader of the corresponding team to resolve such issues. If the issues cannot be resolved, the team will not be eligible to receive prizes.

For more details on the metrics and leaderboard, see the Metrics and Leaderboard sections on the Data page.

Two-page extended abstract submission to IEEE ICIP 2026

To be eligible for the prizes, and to be included in the final ranking, the Teams must submit a two-page extended abstract describing their solution to IEEE ICIP 2026. The submission must be done through the conference paper management system https://2026.ieeeicip.org/paper-submission/ (please select the appropriate Grand Challenge: ClearSAR).

Solution presentation

The winners of the ClearSAR Challenge will be publicly awarded during IEEE ICIP 2026 held in Tampere, Finland from 13-17 September 2026. To offer the winners the chance to present their solutions and to ensure full transparency of the products, the winning teams are expected to present their respective solutions.