SPATRA Partners Receive Best Paper Award at CogMob 2025

SPATRA webinar on Rail Workstream

 

The SPATRA project is proud to announce the recognition of its partners at the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Mobility (CogMob 2025), held on 2–3 October 2025 at the Bosch Budapest Innovation Campus in Hungary.

 

Best Paper Award in Railway Engineering

The paper “Recent Advancements in EO-based Monitoring of Railway Infrastructure” received the Best Paper Award in the field of railway engineering.
The publication is the result of close collaboration between researchers from the University of Niš (Serbia), OHB Digital Services GmbH (Germany), and Széchenyi István University (Hungary).

Authored by Milan Banić, Danijela Ristić-Durrant, Alina Klapper, Dietrich Kuhn, Miloš Simonović, and Szabolcs Fischer, the paper showcases the combined expertise of academic and industrial partners in developing Earth Observation (EO)-based approaches for railway infrastructure monitoring.

 

About the Paper

The awarded study examines how Earth-observation (EO) technologies are reshaping large-scale railway monitoring by turning multi-sensor satellite data into actionable insights for safety and maintenance, while acknowledging hurdles such as coarse thermal resolution and heterogeneous datasets. It surveys recent advances and trends, especially AI driven fusion of optical, SAR, and thermal products, and then introduces SPATRA as a concrete pathway to higher precision, operational outputs for track level risk management. In SPATRA, AI models enhance the spatial and hourly resolution of land surface temperature (LST) by downscaling coarse Sentinel-3 and CLMS inputs with a progressive random forest that leverages fine scale surface features such as NDVI, land cover, and albedo, and then fuse the resulting 30 m LST with in situ rail temperatures and meteorological and solar variables to predict rail track temperatures over a 24 hour horizon, enabling timely interventions when extreme heat could induce track deformation.

This collaboration reflects SPATRA’s multidisciplinary approach, linking research excellence with practical innovation in transport technologies.

 

Conference Overview

The International Conference on Cognitive Mobility (CogMob) brings together researchers and industry representatives focused on intelligent and sustainable mobility.
The 2025 edition in Budapest placed special emphasis on smart infrastructure, autonomous systems, and data-driven maintenance, topics strongly aligned with SPATRA’s objectives to enhance transport monitoring and management through digital innovation.

 

Contribution to SPATRA’s Mission

These achievements strengthen SPATRA’s contribution to European research on:

  • The integration of space-based and in-situ sensing for transport monitoring.
  • Development of predictive maintenance frameworks.
  • Fostering cooperation between academia and industry to accelerate innovation uptake.

SPATRA congratulates all co-authors on their achievements and their contribution to advancing smart, safe, and sustainable transport systems.