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The Video and Image Processing Cup (VIP Cup) competition encourages teams of students to work together to solve real-world problems using video and image processing methods and techniques. Three final teams are chosen to present their work during ICIP to compete for the US$5,000 grand prize!
The current Call for Proposals for the VIP Cup can be found on the SPS Call for Proposals page. Please note that your proposal must be endorsed by one of the TCs. For endorsement, you must submit your proposal for endorsement to the SPS Technical Committee (TC) that best fits your proposal by deadline. You can find the Society’s TCs located on the Technical Committees page on the SPS website.
The submission deadline for TCs to submit endorsed proposals is TBA for the 2025 VIP Cup.
Technical Committees interested in submitting a call for proposal for the upcoming VIP Cup competitions, please visit the Technical Committees page for more information.
IMPORTANT: All team members must fully read and agree to the terms in this SPS Student Competition Terms and Conditions document in order to be eligible in any SPS Student Competition. By checking the agreement checkbox during team registration, all team members agree to all of the Terms & Conditions mentioned in this document:
>> Download a copy of the full SPS SP Cup and VIP Cup Competition Terms & Conditions
IMPORTANT: [Judges and Team Supervisors] The IEEE Conflict of Interest form must be completed before participating in the competition. Complete the Conflict of Interest form.
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 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 of contributing are welcome to participate in a team. A participant cannot be on more than one team.
Specific team ineligibility, in addition to the above. Any of these criteria will result in the team being disqualified/ineligible to continue in the competition:
Important notice: Upon registering a team for the competition, the team must commit to at least one undergraduate team member representing the team by attending the physical competition and participating in the final round of the competition at the physical conference. Should a team not be able to participate physically (in-person) in the final round of the competition held at the respective conference (ICASSP or ICIP) for any reason, at any point in the competition, then the team must notify SPS Staff and organizers immediately. This will likely result in the team being ineligible to continue in the competition, therefore forfeiting their position in the competition. Teams must make every effort to attend the final round at the conference; visa issues may be an exception. If all team members are unable to obtain visas, please be prepared to present proof of visa process, communication to obtain visa, as well as a visa denial. All eligibility decisions are at the discretion of the SPS Student Services Committee and competition organizers.
Should a team be disqualified or forfeit their finalist position for any reason, the next team selected by the organizers may be contacted to compete in the final round, following the same rules listed above.
The judging for the final phase of the competition held live at the conference will be based on five equally weighted criteria, unless otherwise specified by the competition organizers in the Official SP Cup Document/Call for Participation. Each of the three finalist teams will be scored on the five criteria and the team with the highest score will place 1st, the team with the second highest score will place 2nd, and the team with the third highest score will place 3rd in the competition.
The five equally weighted criteria are:
Each criterion is scored with a 1, 2, or 3; the best team in each criterion will receive 3 points, the second best team will receive 2 points, and the third best team will receive 1 point. The final winning rankings will be based on the highest points awarded from the five criteria during judge deliberations at the end of the competition. Final rankings are ultimately decided by the judges, at their discretion.
Any judge or team supervisor participating in the competition must sign a Conflict-of-Interest Form agreeing to the following key points. Full information is on the Conflict-of-Interest Form.
Conflict of Interest concerns shall be disclosed and addressed in accordance with IEEE Policies 9.9 A, B. and C and IEEE Policy 4.4.H. - Eligibility and Process Limitations. Judges involved at any stage of the team rankings/scoring process for an SP competition shall be ineligible to judge/vote on the outcome of team rankings for the competition in which the conflict exists. Any real and perceived conflict of interest shall be avoided. Conflict of interest shall be defined as any relationships, professional or otherwise, that can affect impartiality and objectivity. Such relationships include, but are not limited to the below list. This list also applies.
In our SPS Policies and Procedures. The IEEE Conflict of Interest form (also mentioned above) must be completed before participating in the competition.
The Society leadership will create an ad hoc committee to handle each matter requiring conflict resolution.
Decisions need not be unanimous; final outcomes may be determined by majority vote of the membership of the ad hoc committee. Dissenting members may include their dissenting opinion as part of the report; the length of such dissent will be determined as part of the committee’s operational rules.
After the ad hoc committee has determined its final ruling, the ad hoc committee chair shall be responsible for preparing a short report documenting the committee’s findings. The report shall be provided to the individual who brought the conflict matter forward.
The three teams with highest performance in the open competition based on the judging criteria will be selected as finalists and invited to participate in the final competition at ICIP. The 1st place (Champion) team will receive a grand prize of US$5,000. The teams placing 2nd (First Runner-Up) and 3rd (Second Runner-Up) will receive a prize of US$2,500 and US$1,500. See the current Official VIP Cup Document below for full details on the prize offerings.
Receipts are required for all expenses reimbursed under the travel support..
Prior to claiming your travel grant award, you must submit receipts of your travel expenses that are equal to or exceed the grant amount in order to receive the full travel grant payment. Travel expenses include: air fare, train tickets, hotel, visa fees, transit, meals, and conference registration. Receipts are required for all items and must equal to or exceed the total reimbursement amount. The receipts must show the form of payment used, name, date, and amount paid. Hotel reservation confirmations or bookings, invoices, or quotes for airfare are not acceptable receipts unless the proof of payment is also provided with the document.
IEEE ICIP 2025 Website | 14-17 September 2025 | 2025 VIP Cup 2024 Official Document
[Sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society]
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, have gained significant prominence in recent years due to their diverse applications in areas such as surveillance, delivery, agriculture, logistics, disaster response, and military operations. However, the proliferation of drones has also introduced critical challenges such as unauthorized aerial activity, potential threats from payload delivery systems including payload delivery for malicious purposes as well as major security and privacy concerns. This necessitates the detection and tracking of drones, along with the identification of their payloads to ensure safety and security, particularly in sensitive or restricted areas.
Traditional vision-based approaches for drone detection predominantly rely on RGB images, which are often hindered by environmental factors such as low light, fog, or glare. On the other hand, infrared (IR) imaging provides complementary information by capturing thermal signatures enabling robust detection in challenging conditions such as nighttime or occlusion even in cases where the drones are exceedingly far from the field of view (FoV) of the surveillance cameras. Although it may seem that infrared imaging outperforms RGB imaging in such cases, standalone use of IR data may lack the spatial and textural richness provided by RGB images. This makes it essential to combine the two modalities to leverage their complementary strengths.
Alongside drone detection, the ability to detect and identify payloads carried by drones is critical due to the potential risks associated with unauthorized or malicious payload delivery. Payloads may include hazardous materials, surveillance equipment, or contraband, posing threats to public safety, security, and privacy. Identifying payloads in real-time enables proactive measures to mitigate risks making it an essential aspect of drone monitoring systems. However, identifying and analyzing payloads carried by drones poses unique challenges. Payloads may vary in size, shape and thermal properties making it difficult to rely on a single modality for robust detection. RGB imaging provides critical visual cues for recognizing payload shapes and textures while IR imaging can highlight heat signatures of payloads, particularly those carrying heat-generating devices or components. A fusion-based approach is therefore crucial to enhance payload detection accuracy and reliability.
The datasets, for both payload identification and drone detection, would be made available to the registered participants. The proposed solutions must be able to detect and track drones and identify the payload in real-time for each scenario considered in the datasets. A detailed description of the datasets along with a summary of each scenario considered will be provided with the datasets. Annotations for the training set will be made available along with the release of the datasets. The participants are also required to submit readable code of the proposed algorithm (preferably Python) with appropriate documentation and a brief description of the steps followed. Each solution should contain a demo code that could be used to run the submitted solution for a test video. The classification accuracy for the drone must be displayed in real-time on the test video while it is being played. The classification accuracy for the identified payload can be reported at the end of inference. The participants are also required to share the inference time (an evaluation metric) of their code and system specifications on which it was implemented.
The proposed solution must meet the following criteria:
Full technical details, dataset(s), evaluation metrics, and all other pertinent information about the competition is located in the 2025 VIP Cup Official Document.
SPS Technical Committee: Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing
Competition Organizers (technical, competition-specific inquiries):