Real-World Surveillance: Applications and Challenges Call for Papers

We are organizing the 
6th Workshop on Real-World Surveillance
(full title: 
Real-World Surveillance: Applications and Challenges, 6th)
in conjunction with WACV 2026 which takes place in Tucson, AZ, USA. The
workshop website can be accessed with the following link: https://vap.aau.dk/rws/ The
workshop date is either March 6 or March 7. The paper deadline is
December 7, 11:59 PM AoE. Could you please add our CFP to your list?
You can find the detailed CFP below. Thank you very much!

 

Call for Papers

Computer vision methods trained on public databases demonstrate
performance drift when deployed for real-world surveillance, compared
to their initial results on the test set of those employed
databases. In this workshop, we are interested in papers reporting
their experimental results on any application of computer vision in
real-world surveillance and object security, including the protection
of buildings and facilities within critical infrastructure, challenges
they have faced, and their mitigation strategy on topics like, 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 deadline: December 7th, 2025 (11:59 PM, AoE)
Paper submission deadline for challenge participants: December 14th, 2025 (11:59 PM, AoE)
Decision notification: December 23rd, 2025
Camera-ready: January 9th, 2026 (11:59 PM, PT)

 

Submission

Submitted papers are handled via OpenReview accessible here 

Paper template and guidelines for the workshop are similar to those of WACV
and can be found here

 

Challenge

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, 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

Best regards,
Andreas

 

-- 

Dr.-Ing. Andreas Specker
Fraunhofer-Institut für Optronik, Systemtechnik
und Bildauswertung IOSB
Abt. Videoauswertesysteme VID
Fraunhoferstraße 1, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
Telefon: +49 (0) 721 6091-629
andreas.specker@iosb.fraunhofer.de

www.iosb.fraunhofer.de