IJCB 2026 Competition on Adapting Foundation Models for Face Recognition Call for Papers

We are pleased to announce the 
IJCB 2026 Competition on Adapting Foundation Models for Face Recognition
organized as part of the 
International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2026).

This competition aims to foster research on adaptation strategies for
foundation models in face recognition (FR), particularly in
challenging scenarios with limited training data or where privacy
constraints restrict access to real biometric datasets.

Competition Tracks:

Track 1 - Full Data Track: Participants can use a large-scale provided
training dataset to adapt foundation models.

Track 2 - Limited Data Track: Participants are restricted to a
small subset of the training data, encouraging data-efficient
adaptation methods.

The competition is based on fully synthetic face datasets generated
using state-of-the-art generative techniques. Participants are
required to exclusively use the provided datasets for model
adaptation.

We warmly invite researchers, students, and industry practitioners
from computer vision, biometrics, and machine learning to participate.

Competition website and registration: 
https://sites.google.com/view/ijcb-afmfr-2026/home

The competition is co-organized with Tahar Chettaoui, Shiqi Yu,
Vitomir Štruc, and Fadi Boutros, in affiliation to ATHENE Center,
Fraunhofer IGD, TU Darmstadt, University of Ljubljana, and Southern
University of Science and Technology.

We look forward to your participation!

Best regards,
Naser Damer
Fraunhofer IGD and TU Darmstadt