The ICPR 2018 Contest Co-Chairs invite proposals for contests to be held within the framework of the Conference. The aim of the contests is to advance algorithm and method development in pattern recognition by objective evaluation on common datasets. The contest organizer is responsible for providing good quality data and defining objective evaluation criteria that are applied to the results of submitted algorithms.

Proposals should contain the following information:
1. Contest title and abstract.
2. General description of the problem.
3. Description of the dataset to be used.
4. Description of the specific contest tasks.
5. Evaluation metrics or tool to be used for evaluation.
6. Plans for contest web site.
7. Contact information for the organizer(s).
8. Brief CVs of the organizer(s).

The following rules will apply to the accepted contests:
• All contests must run well in advance of the conference.
• Datasets used in the contests should be made available after the end of the contests.
• Evaluation methodologies and metrics must be clearly described and easy to apply.
• Contests should have sufficient number of participants to be able to draw meaningful conclusions.
• Contest organizers should present the contest organization and results at a special session of ICPR 2018 on the day before the main conference.
• Reports (full papers) on each contest will be reviewed and, if accepted (the contest run according to plan and is appropriately described), will be published in the ICPR2018 conference proceedings.

Submission
Proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the ICPR Contests Chairs:
• Dimosthenis Karatzas (dimos@cvc.uab.es)
• Xiang Bai (xbai@hust.edu.cn)