28^th - International Conference on Pattern Recognition

Lyon, France August, 17-22, 2026

International Convention Center

Call for Competition Proposal

The ICPR 2026 Organizing Committee invites proposals for competitions that aim at evaluating the performance of algorithms and methods related to pattern recognition. You are cordially invited to submit a proposal, that should contain the following information:

Contest title and abstract
A brief description of the competition, including what the particular task under evaluation is, why this competition is of interest to the ICPR community, and the expected number of participants
An outline of the competition schedule
Description of the dataset to be used, and the evaluation process and metrics for submitted methods
The names, contact information, and brief CVs of the competition organizers, outlining previous experience in performance evaluation and/or organizing competitions

The following rules shall apply to the accepted Competitions

The name of competition must be standardized by starting with "ICPR 2026" e.g. "ICPR 2024 Competition on …" or "ICPR 2026 … Competition."

Datasets used in the competitions must be made available after the end of the competitions. Specifically, the training data and ground truth must be publicly released and there must be a way to evaluate performance on a test set. This could take the form of an evaluation server, or the test data, ground truth, and evaluation script could be made publicly available.

Evaluation methodologies and metrics used must be described in detail so that results can be replicated later. Evaluation scripts must be released afterwards.

Each competition has to be presented with a poster at a prominent place at the conference venue, and some good competitions may be selected for oral presentation during ICPR 2026.

Competitions must have a sufficient number of participants (greater or equal to 3) to be able to draw meaningful conclusions.

Reports (full papers) on each competition will be reviewed and, if accepted (the competition ran according to plan, attracted a minimum level of participation and is appropriately described), will be published in the ICPR 2026 conference proceedings.

Participants should not have access to the ground-truth test dataset until the end of the competition. The evaluation should be done by the organizers.

Submission Guidelines & Inquiries

All proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the Competition Chairs (Lian Wen Jin, Richard Zanibbi, and Laurence Likforman-Sulem) via: icpr2026competition@gmail.com We encourage competition proposals with a solid plan to remain active and challenging for the community over and above ICPR 2026. For any inquiries you may have regarding the competitions, please contact us via above email.

Important dates (CET)
November 1st, 2025	Competition Proposal Due
December 1st, 2025	Competition Acceptance Notification
December 15, 2025	Individual Competition Websites are Live
March 1st, 2026	Deadline for competition participants
April 1st, 2026	Initial Submission of Competition Reports Deadline
May, 2026	Camera-Ready Papers Due
June, 2026	Communicate Winners to Chairs
August 17–21, 2026	Presentation at ICPR Conference

Flyers of Call for Competition

The main flyer of the call for competition is available here:

ICPR 2026 Conference flyer Call for competition preview