These are the official rules (terms and Conditions) that govern how the LimitIRSTD challenge on the resource-limited infrared small target detection will operate. This challenge will be simply referred to as the “challenge” or the “contest” through the remaining part of these rules and may be named as “LimitIRSTD” benchmark, challenge, or contest, elsewhere (our webpage, our documentation and publications.)

In these rules, “we”, “our” and “us” refer to the organizers of this challenge, and “you” refers to an eligible contest participant.

Note that, these official rules can change during the contest until the start of the final phase. If, at any point during the contest, the registered participant considers that they cannot anymore meet the eligibility criteria or does not agree with the changes in the official terms and conditions, it is the responsibility of the participant to send an email to the organizers such that to be removed from all the records. Once the contest is over, no change will be made to the status of the registered participants and their entries.

In order to be eligible for judging, an entry must meet all the following requirements:

Entry contents: The participants are required to submit codes and models (*.pth). The top-ranking participants could publicly release their codes under a license of their choice, taken among popular OSI-approved licenses (http://opensource.org/licenses), and make their code (or executables) online accessible for a period of not less than one year following the end of the challenge (applies only for top three ranked participants of the competition). To enter the final ranking, the participants will need to fill out a survey (fact sheet) briefly describing their method. All the participants are also invited (not mandatory) to submit a paper for peer-reviewing and publication at the ICPR Workshop and Challenges. The participants' scores must improve the baseline performance provided by the challenge organizers (Baseline model waiting for release).

Use of the provided data: All data provided by ICPR are freely available to the participants from the challenge website under the license terms provided with the data. The data are available only for open research and educational purposes, within the scope of the challenge. ICPR and the organizers make no warranties regarding the database, including but not limited to warranties of non-infringement or fitness for a particular purpose. The copyright of the images remains the property of their respective owners. By downloading and making use of the data, you accept full responsibility for using the data. You shall defend and indemnify ICPR and the organizers, including their employees, Trustees, officers, and agents, against any and all claims arising from your use of the data. You agree not to redistribute the data without this notice.

l  Test data: The organizers will use the test data for the final evaluation and ranking of the entries. The ground truth test data will not be made available to the participants during the contest.

l  Training data: The organizers will make a training dataset with ground truth images available to the participants.

l  Post-challenge analyses: The organizers may also perform additional post-challenge analyses using extra data, but this will not affect the challenge ranking.

l  Submission: The entries will be online submitted via the CodaLab web platform. During the development phase, while the validation server is online, the participants will receive immediate feedback on validation data. The final evaluation will be computed automatically on the test data submissions, but the final scores will be released after the challenge is over.

l  Original work, permissions: In addition, by submitting your entry into this contest, you confirm that to the best of your knowledge: - your entry is your own original work, and - your entry only includes material that you own or that you have permission to use.

Other than what is set forth below, we are not claiming any ownership rights to your entry. However, by submitting your entry, you:

Are granting us an irrevocable, worldwide right and license, in exchange for your opportunity to participate in the contest and potential prize awards, for the duration of the protection of the copyrights to:

l  Use, review, assess, test, and otherwise analyze results submitted or produced by your code or executable and other material submitted by you in connection with this contest and any future research or contests by the organizers;

l  Feature your entry and all its content in connection with the promotion of this contest in all media (now known or later developed);

Agree to sign any necessary documentation that may be required for us and our designees to make use of the rights you granted above;

Understand and acknowledge that we and other entrants may have developed or commissioned materials similar or identical to your submission, and you waive any claims you may have resulting from any similarities to your entry;

Understand that we cannot control the incoming information you will disclose to our representatives in the course of entering, or what our representatives will remember about your entry. You also understand that we will not restrict work assignments of representatives who have had access to your entry. By entering this contest, you agree that the use of information in our representatives’ unaided memories in the development or deployment of our products or services does not create liability for us under this agreement or copyright or trade secret law;

Understand that you will not receive any compensation or credit for using your entry other than what is described in these official rules.

If you do not want to grant us these rights to your entry, please do not enter this contest.

The participants will follow the instructions on the CodaLab website to submit entries.

The participants will be registered as mutually exclusive teams. Each CodaLab account is allowed to submit only one single final entry.

The participants must follow the instructions and the rules. We will automatically disqualify incomplete or invalid entries.

The board of ICPR will select a panel of judges to judge the entries; all judges will be forbidden to enter the contest and will be experts in causality, statistics, machine learning, computer vision, or a related field, or experts in challenge organization. A list of the judges will be made available upon request. The judges will review all eligible entries received and select three winners for each of the two competition tracks based on the prediction score on test data. The judges will verify that the winners complied with the rules, including that they documented their method by filling out a fact sheet.

The decisions of these judges are final and binding. The distribution of prizes according to the decisions made by the judges will be made within three months after the completion of the last round of the contest. If we do not receive a sufficient number of entries meeting the entry requirements, we may, at our discretion based on the above criteria, not award any or all of the contest prizes below. In the event of a tie between any eligible entries, the tie will be broken by giving preference to the earliest submission, using the time stamp of the submission platform.

Publishing papers is optional and will not be a condition to entering the challenge or winning prizes. The top ranking participants are invited to submit a maximum 8-pages paper (ICPR 2024 author rules) for peer-reviewing to ICPR workshop.

The results of the challenge will be published together with ICPR 2024 workshop papers in the 2024 ICPR Workshops proceedings.

The top-ranked participants and participants contributing interesting and novel methods to the challenge will be invited to be co-authors of the challenge report paper, which will be published in the 2024 ICPR Workshops proceedings. A detailed description of the ranked solution as well as the reproducibility of the results are a must to be an eligible co-author.

If there is any change to data, schedule, instructions of participation, or these rules, the registered participants will be notified through wechat or email they provided with the registration.

Within seven days following the determination of winners, we will send a notification to the potential winners.