ICDAR 2027: Call for Competitions
The ICDAR 2027 Organizing Committee invites proposals for competitions focused on benchmarking models & systems that address document analysis and recognition tasks. We encourage competition proposals with a solid plan to remain active and challenging for the community beyond ICDAR 2027.
You are cordially invited to submit a proposal containing the following information:
Contest title and abstract (1 paragraph)
Organizer names and contact information
Summary of the organizers’ previous experience in performance evaluation and/or organizing competitions (max. 2-3 paragraphs in length)
Brief summary of the overall competition design, including:
the particular task under evaluation,
the data, data annotations, and metrics that will be used,
how the competition is novel and/or of interest to the ICDAR community,
the expected number of participants or methods, and
an outline of the competition schedule.
Detailed description of the experimental design and execution, including:
details/specifics regarding the data to be used & available annotations
the evaluation protocol and performance metrics, with justification using recent relevant work in the field
provided baseline systems and/or provided code (e.g., starter kits)
the platform to be used for data sharing, submission, and result verification
A description of how the competition will be promoted to attract participants.
To attract participants, it is helpful to target competition tasks in emerging fields, or in well-established areas with open research questions.
The following will apply to accepted competitions:
The competition name must be standardized by starting with “ICDAR 2027” (e.g., “ICDAR 2027 Competition on …” or “ICDAR 2027 … Competition.”)
Competition reports will be submitted as full papers. Review criteria include:
(1) whether the competition ran according to plan,
(2) whether the competition attracted sufficient participation, and
(3) whether the report provides a clear and sufficiently detailed description of the competition execution and outcomes, including the evaluation methodology.
Accepted competition papers will be published in the ICDAR 2027 proceedings, and must be presented as a poster at the conference venue. Selected competitions will also have an oral presentation in a dedicated competitions session at ICDAR 2027.
Datasets and Evaluation Scripts:
Participants should not have access to the ground-truth test dataset until the end of the competition. The final/formal evaluation should be done by the organizers.
Datasets used in competitions must be made available very shortly after the competition concludes (e.g., after camera-ready papers are submitted), and well before the conference. Specifically, the training data and ground truth must be publicly released, and there must be a way to automatically 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.
The organizers should submit any new datasets created for their competition to IAPR TC10 or TC11 for archiving.
Evaluation scripts must be released after the competition concludes.
ICDAR 2026 Competitions Schedule
Competition proposal submission Oct. 25, 2026
Competition acceptance notification Nov. 12, 2026
Competition websites live Nov. 28, 2026
Suggested deadline for competition participants April 03, 2027
Competition paper submissions April 17, 2027
Accepted paper camera-ready submissions May 4, 2027
Communication of winners to competition chairs June 1, 2027
Presentation of results at ICDAR 2027 Aug 18 - 22, 2027
Submission Guidelines & Inquiries
Proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the competition chairs, Richard Zanibbi (USA), Alicia Fornes (Spain), and Moisés Diaz (Spain) at : cc@icdar2027.org
Please include ICDAR 2027 Competition in the subject line.
For any inquiries, please contact the competition chairs using the same email above.