Spacecraft Recognition Leveraging Knowledge of Space Environment: Simulator, Dataset, Competition Design and Analysis

SPARK represents the first edition of the SPAcecraft Recognition leveraging Knowledge of space environment competition organized by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) in conjunction with the 2021 IEEE International Conference in Image Processing (ICIP 2021). By providing a unique synthetic dataset composed of 150k annotated multi-modal images, SPARK aims at encouraging researchers to develop innovative solutions for space target recognition and detection. This paper introduces the proposed dataset and provides a global analysis of the results obtained for the 17 submissions.