Optical/IR long-baseline interferometry has its imaging contest. The 2024 contest is ongoing!

What for? The stars, black-holes and galaxies optical/IR long-baseline interfeormetry (OLBI) is a technique providing exquisite angular resolution on our Universe sources of light. Imagine peeking at a galaxy with a virtual telescope that has the resolution of a 130m telescope ; that’s what interferometry promises!

However, this comes at a hefty price : the path from obtaining data and producing an actual image of the star or galaxy is rough and bumpy. Several image reconstruction techniques have been developed along the years to overcome the intrinsic limitations of OLBI (namely: sparse uv coverage, noisy data, non-convexity of inputs, etc.)

In order to compare image reconstruction techniques, a contest was set up as early as 2004, before the VLTI had the capacities of producing an image. Since then, it was organized every 2 years with a wide participation of teams and algorithms.

I found out that there are no page referencing all interferometry contests, so the idea here is to group papers at one place so that someone can experiment his own algorithms on existing datasets with their caveats and features.

Note that some contests oifits datasets are stored at the OiDB database:

Other contests

There is an exoplanet contest that is organised every year. It contains as well a census of other contests here