The IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME) has been the flagship multimedia conference sponsored by four IEEE societies since 2000. It serves as a forum to promote the exchange of the latest advances in multimedia technologies, systems, and applications from both the research and development perspectives of the circuits and systems, communications, computer, and signal processing communities.

The organization of grand challenges for IEEE ICME 2021 is significantly revamped to better facilitate participation and impact. Please see the following guidelines for this year’s grand challenge (GC) CfP:

1. GC organizers cannot participate as competitors in the GC they are organizing.

2. GC organizers should provide a dataset that is open for competition, in particular: i) a training set with ground truth that is available to all participants, and ii) a testing set that is also available to participants, but whose ground truth is hidden. GC organizers are responsible for evaluating all submitted models using the testing set (plus, optionally, a second testing set that is hidden to the participants).

3. GC organizers should coordinate reviews of GC papers that describe their submitted models. Submitted GC papers can optionally have missing results section, which will be completed after GC organizers has completed their evaluations. GC papers have the same camera-ready deadline as regular papers, but a much tighter review cycle. GC paper submission deadline should coincide with the model submission deadline for GCs. Similarly, GC paper acceptance announcement should coincide with the model evaluation results announcement. See below listed dates for details. This gives participants the maximal amount of time to prepare their models for submission to GC organizers for evaluation.

4. GC organizers should organize accepted GC papers into their own 2-hour GC session in the ICME’19 program, which should include GC paper presentations (oral or poster), followed by a panel or open discussion. Winners of competitions should be announced during the GC sessions.

5. Based on the quality of the accepted GC papers, GC organizers can subsequently submit a proposal for inclusion in special section of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia via expedited reviews. Further, GC organizers can submit renewal of successfully coordinated GC for the following ICME rendition.

IEEE ICME 2021 is inviting proposals for its Grand Challenges program. To submit a proposal for a Grand Challenge, please complete the form below, and submit it to the IEEE ICME 2021 grand challenges chairs by the GC proposal deadline.

Proposals should include a one-page call for participation, a Grand Challenge description, a list of potential participants, the dataset provided for training and evaluation, evaluation criteria, guidelines, and submission deadline. Examples of possible Grand Challenges are:

• Point Cloud / Light Field Image Coding
• Visual Attention Modeling for Virtual Reality / 360 Videos
• DASH-based Video Streaming
• Face Recognition
• Image Retrieval

Please send all Grand Challenge proposals and related questions via email to Grand Challenges Chairs:

Shan Liu (shanl [AT] tencent.com), Liqiang Nie (nieliqiang [AT] gmail.com) and Zhengjun Zha (zhazj [AT] ustc.edu.cn).

Important Dates

• Grand Challenge proposal submission deadline: October 11, 2020
• New Grand Challenge proposal submission deadline: November 01, 2020
• Grand Challenge paper submission deadline:
• Grand Challenge model submission deadline:
• Grand Challenge paper acceptance notification:
• Grand Challenge model evaluation results announcement:
• Grand Challenge camera-ready paper submission deadline:

Grand Challenge Chairs

Shan Liu

Tencent Media Lab, China

Liqiang Nie

Shandong University, China

Zhengjun Zha

University of Science and Technology of China, China

Form