Pierre Soille

Timeline

1. 1988–1992

   UCLouvain and a watershed paper

   He receives an engineering degree in 1988 from UCLouvain in Belgium and a PhD in agronomical sciences from the same university in 1992, in collaboration with the Centre for Mathematical Morphology of the École des Mines de Paris. In 1991, he and Luc Vincent publish "Watersheds in digital spaces: an efficient algorithm based on immersion simulations" in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

2. 1995–1999

   Assistant professor at Alès

   After his PhD, he does research on image analysis and mathematical morphology at CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences in Sydney, the Centre for Mathematical Morphology of the École des Mines de Paris, and the Pattern Recognition Department of the Fraunhofer-Institut IPK in Berlin. He is an assistant professor at the École des Mines d'Alès from 1995 to 1998, earns a habilitation in computer science at Montpellier II University in 1997, and becomes a senior researcher at the UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council in 1999.

3. 1999–2003

   Morphological Image Analysis at Ispra

   He joins the Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, in December 1999 to work on extracting information from geospatial data at continental or global scales in support of EU policies. His book Morphological Image Analysis appears from Springer-Verlag in 1999, with a second revised and extended edition in 2003.

4. 2011

   The ISMM 2011 proceedings

   With Martino Pesaresi and Georgios Ouzounis, he co-edits the Springer LNCS volume Mathematical Morphology and its Applications to Image and Signal Processing. It collects the 39 papers accepted for the 10th International Symposium on Mathematical Morphology, held in Intra, Italy, in July 2011 and organised by the Joint Research Centre's Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen.

5. 2015–2018

   The JRC big data platform

   He becomes involved with big data at the Joint Research Centre in 2015, first to handle the data streams of the Copernicus Sentinel satellites, and the setting up of a prototype platform begins in 2016. In 2018, he is first author, with six coauthors, of "A Versatile Data-Intensive Computing Platform for Information Retrieval from Big Geospatial Data" in Future Generation Computer Systems. The paper describes the JRC Big Data Platform, a petabyte-scale infrastructure for processing and analysing geospatial data in support of EU policy.

6. 2020

   SatImNet for satellite imagery

   In 2020, he coauthors SatImNet with Vasileios Syrris and Ondrej Pesek, an open collection of structured, harmonised training data for satellite image classification. Two convolutional neural network models for classification and segmentation demonstrate its use. His work includes numerous image analysis, pattern recognition and machine learning methods.

7. 2022–2023

   MSPA code and BiDS proceedings

   In 2022, he and Peter Vogt present "Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis: Open Source Release" at the FOSS4G academic track, linking the MSPA routines to the open-source Morphological Image Analysis Library (MIAL) that he releases on GitHub. In 2023, he edits the Proceedings of the 2023 conference on Big Data from Space with Stefanie Lumnitz and Sergio Albani, a volume of 101 papers accepted from 126 submissions. He also co-chairs the conference series, which the European Space Agency, the Joint Research Centre and the European Union Satellite Centre co-organise.

8. July 2025

   A summer school lecture in Brașov

   A senior scientist at the Joint Research Centre, he leads its Big Data Analytics project and is responsible for the JRC Big Data Platform. In July 2025, he presents "JRC's Big Data Analytics Platform" at the AI4AGRI Summer School in Brașov, Romania, describing its cloud infrastructure, analytical tools, services and open-source contributions.