[visionlist] [CFP][WACV 2026] 6th Workshop on Real-World Surveillance: Applications and Challenges (RWS)

[Specker, Andreas]

[cid:image002.png at 01DC42B1.BDDB4220]

6th Workshop on Real-World Surveillance: Applications and Challenges (RWS)
in conjunction with the
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2026 (https://wacv.thecvf.com/)

WORKSHOP WEBSITE
https://vap.aau.dk/rws/

CALL FOR PAPERS
Computer vision models trained on public datasets often exhibit performance drift when deployed in real-world surveillance, diverging from their reported test-set results. This workshop invites papers presenting experimental results from any real-world surveillance or asset-protection application (e.g., guarding buildings and critical infrastructure), the challenges encountered, and strategies for mitigation on topics including, but not limited to:

  *   Object detection
  *   Tracking
  *   Action recognition
  *   Scene understanding
  *   Super-resolution
  *   Multi-modal surveillance
Furthermore, the workshop has a special attention to legal and ethical issues of computer vision applications in real-world scenarios. We therefore also welcome papers describing their methodology and experimental results on legal matters (like GDPR, AI Act, and US Executive Order on AI) or ethical concerns (like detecting bias towards gender, race, or other characteristics and mitigating strategies). We particularly encourage submissions addressing safety, reliability, and regulatory compliance for critical infrastructure protection, as well as privacy-preserving approaches in high-security environments.

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission:          December 7, 2025 (11:59 PM, AoE)
Paper submission for challenge participants:
December 14, 2025 (11:59 PM, AoE)
Decision notification:     December 23, 2025
Camera-ready:               January 9, 2026 (11:59 PM, PT)
Workshop date:              March 6 or 7, 2026

SUBMISSION
Submitted papers are handled via OpenReview accessible here<https://openreview.net/group?id=thecvf.com/WACV/2026/Workshop/RWS>.
Paper template and guidelines for the workshop are similar to those of WACV and can be found here<https://media.eventhosts.cc/Conferences/WACV2026/wacv-2026-author-kit-template.zip>.
Accepted papers will be included in WACV Workshop proceedings and will be published by the CVF / IEEE.

CHALLENGE: Robust Thermal-Image Object Detection
Ready to stress-test your detector in the wild? The 6th RWS workshop introduce a new challenge on Robust Thermal-Image Object Detection to advance multi-object detection performance under long-term thermal drift.
Real-world thermal imaging is messy: sensors re-calibrate, ambient temperatures swing, and weather keeps changing, slowly eroding detector performance. The RWS Robust Thermal-Image Object Detection Challenge puts this problem front using the LTDv2<https://huggingface.co/datasets/vapaau/LTDv2>, a large-scale dataset purpose-built for bechmarking long-term robustness wtih 1 million frames from video over 8 months, 6.8+ million annotated boxes, and rich weather metadata.

Your mission: build object detectors that don't just perform well on a sunny day, but stay consistent across seasons, weather patterns, and day-night cycles. We'll score submissions on overall mAP and temporal consistency to reward models that are both accurate and stable over time. The challenge features a development phase for method iteration and a final test phase for the leaderboard. A starter kit with dataloaders and YOLOv8 baselines are available to get you up and running quickly. Now it's your turn to beat them.

The CodaBench Robust Thermal-Image Object Detection Challenge Platform can be found here: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/10954/

Challenge Schedule:

  *   October 17th AoE:  Start of competition and Development Phase
  *   December 1st AoE: Start of Testing Phase and end of Development Phase
  *   December 7th AoE: End of competition
  *   December 14th AoE: Paper submission deadline (Challenge Participants only)
  *   December 23rd AoE: Decision notification and announcement of challenge winner
  *   January 9th 11:59 PM, PT: Camera-ready deadline


This challenge is organized by Anders S. Johansen (Aalborg University, Denmark), Andreas Aakerberg, and Kamal Nasrollahi (Aalborg University, and Milestone Systems, Denmark), together with Marco Parola and Mario G.C.A. Cimino (University of Pisa, Italy).
The challenge is hosted on CodaBench, and opens October 17th, 2025. The LTDv2 dataset used in the challenge can be downloaded here.

ORGANIZERS
Andreas Specker
Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and
Image Exploitation IOSB, Karlsruhe, Germany
Mail: andreas.specker at iosb.fraunhofer.de<mailto:andreas.specker at iosb.fraunhofer.de>

Mickael Cormier
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB, Karlsruhe, Germany
Mail: mickael.cormier at iosb.fraunhofer.de<mailto:mickael.cormier at iosb.fraunhofer.de>

Sergio Escalera Guerrero
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Computer Vision Center, Spain
Aalborg University, Denmark
Mail: sescalera at cvc.uab.cat<mailto:sescalera at cvc.uab.cat>

Radu Ionescu
University of Bucharest, Romania
Mail: raducu.ionescu at gmail.com<mailto:raducu.ionescu at gmail.com>

Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Linköping University,Sweden
Mail: fahad.khan at liu.se<mailto:fahad.khan at liu.se>

Kamal Nasrollahi,
Aalborg University, Denmark
Milestones Systems, Denmark
Mail: kn at create.aau.dk<mailto:kn at create.aau.dk>

ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Thomas Moeslund
Aalborg University, Denmark
Mail: tbm at create.aau.dk<mailto:tbm at create.aau.dk>

Anthony Hoogs
Kitware Inc, USA
Mail: anthony.hoogs at kitware.com<mailto:anthony.hoogs at kitware.com>

Shmuel Peleg
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Mail: peleg at mail.huji.ac.il<mailto:peleg at mail.huji.ac.il>

Mubarak Shah
University of Central Florida, USA
Mail: shah at crcv.ucf.edu<mailto:shah at crcv.ucf.edu>

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