Seungsang Oh

Rayson Laroca, Valfride Nascimento, Donggun Kim et al.

Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition (LRLPR) remains a challenging problem in real-world surveillance scenarios, where long capture distances, compression artifacts, and adverse imaging conditions can severely degrade license plate legibility. To promote progress in this area, we organized the ICPR 2026 Competition on Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition, the first competition specifically dedicated to LRLPR using real low-quality data collected under operationally relevant conditions. The competition was based on the LRLPR-26 dataset, which comprises 20,000 training tracks and 3,000 test tracks; each training track contains five low-resolution and five high-resolution images of the same license plate. Notably, a total of 269 teams from 41 countries registered for the competition, and 99 teams submitted valid entries in the Blind Test Phase. The winning team achieved a Recognition Rate of 82.13%, and four teams surpassed the 80% mark, highlighting both the high level of competition at the top of the leaderboard and the continued difficulty of the task. In addition to presenting the competition design, evaluation protocol, and main results, this paper summarizes the methods adopted by the top-5 teams and discusses current trends and promising directions for future research on LRLPR. The competition webpage is available at https://icpr26lrlpr.github.io/

Sanghyeok Chung, Eujin Kim, Donggun Kim et al.

Recent advances in audio generation have increased the risk of realistic environmental sound manipulation, motivating the ESDD 2026 Challenge as the first large-scale benchmark for Environmental Sound Deepfake Detection (ESDD). We propose BEAT2AASIST which extends BEATs-AASIST by splitting BEATs-derived representations along frequency or channel dimension and processing them with dual AASIST branches. To enrich feature representations, we incorporate top-k transformer layer fusion using concatenation, CNN-gated, and SE-gated strategies. In addition, vocoder-based data augmentation is applied to improve robustness against unseen spoofing methods. Experimental results on the official test sets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance across the challenge tracks.

Shuhong Liu, Chenyu Bao, Ziteng Cui et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction (3DRR) Challenge, detailing the proposed methods and results. The challenge seeks to identify robust reconstruction pipelines that are robust under real-world adverse conditions, specifically extreme low-light and smoke-degraded environments, as captured by our RealX3D benchmark. A total of 279 participants registered for the competition, of whom 33 teams submitted valid results. We thoroughly evaluate the submitted approaches against state-of-the-art baselines, revealing significant progress in 3D reconstruction under adverse conditions. Our analysis highlights shared design principles among top-performing methods and provides insights into effective strategies for handling 3D scene degradation.

Jeongbin You, Donggun Kim, Sejun Park et al.

Robust 3D point cloud classification is often pursued by scaling up backbones or relying on specialized data augmentation. We instead ask whether structural abstraction alone can improve robustness, and study a simple topology-inspired decomposition based on the Mapper algorithm. We propose Mapper-GIN, a lightweight pipeline that partitions a point cloud into overlapping regions using Mapper (PCA lens, cubical cover, and followed by density-based clustering), constructs a region graph from their overlaps, and performs graph classification with a Graph Isomorphism Network. On the corruption benchmark ModelNet40-C, Mapper-GIN achieves competitive and stable accuracy under Noise and Transformation corruptions with only 0.5M parameters. In contrast to prior approaches that require heavier architectures or additional mechanisms to gain robustness, Mapper-GIN attains strong corruption robustness through simple region-level graph abstraction and GIN message passing. Overall, our results suggest that region-graph structure offers an efficient and interpretable source of robustness for 3D visual recognition.

Seungeun Lee, Il-Youp Kwak, Kihwan Lee et al.

Recent advancements in deep learning for tabular data have shown promise, but challenges remain in achieving interpretable and lightweight models. This paper introduces Table2Image, a novel framework that transforms tabular data into realistic and diverse image representations, enabling deep learning methods to achieve competitive classification performance. To address multicollinearity in tabular data, we propose a variance inflation factor (VIF) initialization, which enhances model stability and robustness by incorporating statistical feature relationships. Additionally, we present an interpretability framework that integrates insights from both the original tabular data and its transformed image representations, by leveraging Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) and methods to minimize distributional discrepancies. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, achieving superior accuracy, area under the curve, and interpretability compared to recent leading deep learning models. Our lightweight method provides a scalable and reliable solution for tabular data classification.

Il-Youp Kwak, Sunmook Choi, Jonghoon Yang et al.

This technical report describes Chung-Ang University and Korea University (CAU_KU) team's model participating in the Audio Deep Synthesis Detection (ADD) 2022 Challenge, track 1: Low-quality fake audio detection. For track 1, we propose a frequency feature masking (FFM) augmentation technique to deal with a low-quality audio environment. %detection that spectrogram-based models can be applied. We applied FFM and mixup augmentation on five spectrogram-based deep neural network architectures that performed well for spoofing detection using mel-spectrogram and constant Q transform (CQT) features. Our best submission achieved 23.8% of EER ranked 3rd on track 1.