We invite proposals for Grand Challenges that address significant demanding problems, calling for innovative and groundbreaking solutions. Proposals are sought in all areas of image processing, vision and imaging. We specifically seek high-quality proposals that address challenging and unresolved problems within these fields and that can stimulate and engage the research community. We encourage prospective organizers to interact with companies and industry representatives that are interested and willing to sponsor the challenge and award prizes to the winning contributions.
The outcomes of the Grand Challenges will be presented in dedicated special sessions at ICIP 2026. Each session will include an overview by the corresponding challenge organizers, presentations from the top five participants, and a panel or open discussion. After undergoing peer review, two-page extended abstracts of the top five submissions will be published in IEEE Xplore as part of the ICIP 2026 Workshops Proceedings. Presenters will also be invited to submit full papers to the IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing (OJSP).
Grand Challenge Proposal Requirements
A Grand Challenge proposal must be no more than 4 pages and include the following items:
- Title: A short descriptive title of the proposed challenge.
- Organizers: Names, affiliations, contact information such as emails, and short bios of each organizer including relevant prior experience in challenge organization.
- Description: Summary of the goal, scope, and significance of the challenge within the image processing community and related fields.
- Rules for participation: Registration requirements, team eligibility, and guidelines for participants.
- Evaluation: Description of the criteria and methodology used to evaluate and rank participants’ results and to ensure reproducibility. The proposed evaluation methodology should lead to one or more objective figures of merit (FoMs) and, where appropriate, a software tool to compute the FoMs.
- Dataset: If applicable to the challenge, organizers should make the competition datasets available to the participants. Organizers are encouraged to provide at least one training dataset with both input and ground truth and one test dataset without the ground truth—the latter to be used for final assessment.
- Deadlines: Relevant dates, such as submission deadline, data availability, and winner announcement.
- Sponsorship, if any.
The Grand Challenge Organizers must commit to organize peer-review of two-page extended abstracts as part of the solution evaluation process and to host a challenge-dedicated website with instructions to participants and for hosting datasets and collecting submissions of solutions.
Proposals for Grand Challenges must be submitted to the paper management system (opens December 2025).
Important Grand Challenge Dates
- Grand Challenge proposal due date: Dec 17, 2025
- Grand Challenge proposal acceptance notification: Jan 14, 2026
- Grand Challenge web pages with instructions to participants published: Feb 11, 2026
- Grand Challenge two-page extended abstract submission due date (to the conference paper management system): May 13, 2026
- Grand Challenge solution and results submission (to the GC organizers) – May 13, 2026
- Grand Challenge two-page abstract acceptance notification: June 10, 2026
- Grand Challenge camera-ready two-page extended abstract submission due date: July 1, 2026
- Grand Challenge author registration due: July 16, 2026
- Announcement of the GC results and winners: at the conference special session
Grand Challenge Sessions Chairs
Caroline Conti, ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal
Jiaying Liu, Peking University, China
Inquiries should be sent via e-mail to the Grand Challenge Chairs: [email protected]