CALL FOR COMPETITIONS

We invite proposals for the competition track of the 21st International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP 2021) to be held in Lecce, Italy. We solicit competition proposals on any topic of interest to the ICIAP  community. We especially encourage competition proposals from emerging new fields or new application domains related to Image Analysis and processing. Interdisciplinary topics that will attract a significant cross-section of the community are especially highly encouraged.
THERE WILL BE TWO TYPES OF COMPETITIONS
There will be a competition track at ICIAP 2021, co-located with the conference, where competition results will be presented and discussed, a small slot of time will be given to each competition.  Competition organizers will be asked to propose a tentative schedule for presentation of the competition and its results during an assigned time slot; ICIAP  will provide coffee breaks and, if necessary, poster facilities.
Data science competitions (standard)

where participants will compete to obtain the best score on a data driven task of interest to the pattern recognition and computer vision community based on a problem defined by the organizers of the competition.
Live competitions

Participants will present live demos at ICIAP 2021 which apply methodology to an application domain defined by the organizers of the live competition.
PROPOSAL PREPARATION AND SUBMISSION
Task chosen

Impact, originality, relevance to the ICIAP community will all be considered. Tasks that include humanitarian and/or positive societal impact are especially highly encouraged, although other topics relevant to the ICIAP community will also be considered. Competition should have sufficient number of participants to be able to draw meaningful conclusions.
Protocol of competition

Feasibility of the task chosen, soundness of the evaluation criteria, and clarity and fairness of the competition rules will all be considered. Datasets used in the competitions should be made available after the end of the competitions, if they are not already available.
Logistics :

where participants will compete to obtain the best score on a data driven task of interest to the pattern recognition and computer vision community based on a problem defined by the organizers of the competition.
Reviewing and selection process

The factors that will be considered when evaluating proposals include:

A short presentation of the competition:

Why the challenge is of interest to the conference and to the scientific community? Does the challenge address an appropriate and relevant topic or topics of ICIAP? Is the challenge goal reasonably reachable according to the time schedule presented below? Is standard or a live competition?
The data (standard competition:

Training and test data, a description of the annotations provided, and a detailed description of the rules relative to the competition and the metrics used to measure performance. Both the training and test data must be unpublished and not provided to other people before. Should we also allow datasets that are previously public but not used for challenge or competition? This will also not shoot us in the foot if a challenge is repeated for new competitions from previous years (or in future some challenges from ICIAP 21 to be repeated in later ICIAP conferences).
The organizing team:

A description of the team that is going to manage the competition and evaluate the results. Diversity in the team of competition organizers is generally recommended. It is good to include a number of people from different backgrounds with experience in the field. These might include researchers from a number of different academic institutes, as well as from industry, who have worked on a variety of projects related to the topic of interest.
The competition schedules:

Each challenge would require an ad-hoc release of portion of training set, as well as specific time for the data analysis. please provide a detailed time schedule considering the one provided below.

 
An ad-hoc site:

The administration of the challenge must include the availability of a site for the datasets download, a resource for clear information and contacts and a way to provide results to the organization teem.
Publications:

: A high profile overview paper on the results of your challenge is a good way to inform the community about the results of your comparative study. Include your plans on this topic.
Competition promotion:

Describe the plan that organizers have to promote participation in the competition (e.g., mailing lists in which the call will be distributed, invited talks, etc.). Please also describe your plan for attracting participants of groups under-represented at ICIAP.

  

 

Standard data science and live competition proposals must both be submitted via email at:

 competition@iciap2021.org

 

IMPORTANT DATES
 Competition proposal submission deadline: November 1st, 2021
Acceptance notification: December 1st 2021
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
Competition organizers should propose a timeline for running the competition to ensure that participants have enough time to contribute a high-quality entries. It is recommended that competitions be completed by late February or early February 2022 at the absolute latest.
Competition organizers that require help or suggestions regarding competition platforms for running the competition can contact the competition chair for advice.
COMPETITION CHAIRS

Pier Luigi Mazzeo

Workshop & Competition Chair

Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems, CNR, Italy

    Emanuele Frontoni

    Workshop & Competition Chair

    Università Politecnica delle Marche Italy