Video & Image Processing Cup

The IEEE SPS Video and Image Processing Cup (VIP Cup) student competition, presented by the IEEE Signal Processing Society, gives students the opportunity to work together to solve real-life problems using video and image processing methods. After students submit their work, three final teams are selected to present their work and compete for the grand prize at ICIP 2022.

Interested in competing? The submission deadline is August 8, 2022. For full competition details, eligibility requirements, and team registration, visit the IEEE Signal Processing Society website.

Synthetic Image Detection

The topic is “Synthetic Image Detection” in which the aim is to distinguish real versus AI-based content in images. Teams are requested to design a strategy for synthetic image detection by relying on image processing and machine learning techniques.

Challenge Organization

Competitors are asked to work in the challenging scenario where it is not known the method used to generate synthetic data. More specifically the test data comprises:

• both fully synthetic images and partially manipulated ones,
• generative models that include not only GANs, but also more recent diffusion-based models.

Being able to discriminate synthetic images, fully and partially synthetic, vs pristine ones can represent a step forward to the advancement of forensics tools. The challenge will consist of two stages: an open competition that any eligible team can participate in, and an invitation-only final competition. Eligible teams must submit their entries by September 5, 2022. The three teams with the highest performance will be selected by September 10, 2022 and invited to join the final competition. The final competition will be judged at ICIP 2022, which will be held on October 16-19, 2022. 

Open Competition - Part I

Part 1 of the open competition is designed to give teams a simplified version of the problem at hand to become familiar with the task. Participants will be provided with a labeled training dataset of real and synthetic images. Synthetic images can be fully or partially synthetic. Images will undergo JPEG compression at different quality levels and resizing prior to compression. Teams will be provided with PYTHON scripts to apply these operations to the training dataset. Teams are requested to provide the executable code to the organizers in order to test the algorithms on the evaluation dataset (Test-set 1).

Open Competition - Part 2

Part 2 of the competition is designed to address a more challenging task: synthetic image detection on unseen models, i.e. synthetic data generated using architectures not present in training. The task remains the same as for Part 1. Teams are requested to provide the executable code to the organizers in order to test the algorithms on the evaluation dataset (Test-set 2). 

Final Competition

The three highest scoring teams from the open competition will be selected and they can provide an additional submission.

More information on training set and test sets will be available on 25 July on the web page and Piazza class. 

Challenge Evaluation Criteria

The finalist teams will be selected based on the results achieved during the open competition. Results will be judged for Part 1 and Part 2 by means of balanced accuracy for the detection task.

The final competition score will be the weighted average between the accuracy obtained in Part 1 and Part 2 computed as Score = (0.7 x Accuracy Part I) + (0.3 x Accuracy Part 2)

Team Formation Eligibility

Each team participating should be composed of one faculty member or someone with a PhD degree employed by the university (the Supervisor), at most one graduate student (the Tutor), and at least three, but no more than ten undergraduate students. At least three of the undergraduate team members must hold either regular or student memberships of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Undergraduate students who are in the first two years of their college studies, as well as high school students who are capable to contribute are welcome to participate in a team. A participant cannot be on more than one team.

Prize for Finalists

The three teams with highest performance in the open competition will be selected as finalists and invited to participate in the final competition at ICIP 2022. The champion team will receive a grand prize of $5,000. The first and the second runner-up will receive a prize of $2,500 and $1,500, respectively, in addition to travel grants and complimentary conference registrations.

• Up to three student members from each finalist team will be provided travel support to attend the conference in-person. In-person attendance of the physical conference is required for reimbursement. 
• Complimentary conference registration for all team members.
• The finalist teams will also be invited to join the Conference Banquet and the SPS Student Job Fair, so that they can meet and talk to SPS leaders and global experts. Please note registration to the Conference Banquet and Student Job Fair is limited and based on availability. *

* These complimentary conference registrations cannot be used to cover any papers accepted by the conference. If you wish to receive complimentary registration and/or conference banquet access, you must email Jaqueline Rash, Jaqueline.rash@ieee.org, with this information once your team has been selected as a finalist.

Timeline

• 25 July, 2022: Release of data and submission information
• 8 August, 2022: First submission deadline
• 13 August, 2022: Ranking publication of the first submission on Test-set 1
• 22 August, 2022: Second submission deadline
• 27 August, 2022: Ranking publication of the first and second submission on both Test-sets
• 1 September, 2022: Team registration deadline
• 5 September, 2022: Third submission deadline
• 10 September, 2022: Finalists announced 

Register

Official VIP Cup document

Additional Information

General information and resources are available on the web page and Piazza class. To set up a free account, use the access code "vipcup2022" to join as a student the "VIPCUP 2022: IEEE Video and Image Processing Cup" class.

Organizers

The challenge is organized as a joint effort between the Image Processing Research Group (GRIP) of the University Federico II of Naples (Italy) and NVIDIA (USA). The GRIP team is represented by Prof. Luisa Verdoliva (Associate Professor), Dr. Davide Cozzolino (Assistant Professor), Fabrizio Guillaro (Ph.D. Student) and Riccardo Corvi (Research Fellow). NVIDIA is represented by Dr. Koki Nagano.

This competition is supported by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and SPS Information Forensics and Security Committee.

Finalist Teams

Grand Prize - Team Name: FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
University: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Supervisor: Christian Riess
Tutor: Anatol Maier
Students: Vinzenz Dewor, Luca Beetz, ChangGeng Drewes, Tobias Gessler

First Runner-Up - Team Name: Megatron
University: Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
Supervisor: Dr. Shaikh Anowarul Fattah,
Students: Bishmoy Paul, Md Awsafur Rahman, Najibul Haque Sarker, Zaber Ibn Abdul Hakim

Second Runner-Up - Team Name: Sherlock
University: Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
Supervisor: Mohammad Ariful Haque
Students: Fazle Rabbi, Asif Quadir, Indrojit Sarkar, Shahriar Kabir Nahin, Sawradip Saha, Sanjay Acharjee