ICME 2026 Grand Challenge on Cross-Scenario Defect Detection and Fine-Grained Severity Grading for High-Precision Manufacturing

This paper presents the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 2026 Grand Challenge on Cross-Scenario Defect Detection and Fine-Grained Severity Grading for High-Precision Manufacturing. The challenge is motivated by two key limitations of existing industrial defect inspection systems: (1) current deep learning-based methods often suffer significant performance degradation when deployed in unseen production scenarios, and (2) most benchmarks neglect severity-aware assessment, which is critical for risk control and yield optimization. To address these limitations, we design two complementary tracks: Track 1 (Cross-Scenario Defect Detection) targets accurate defect detection, localization, and classification across diverse unseen production environments; Track 2 (Fine-Grained Severity Grading) requires assigning each detected defect an industry-standard severity level, including Acceptable, Marginal NG, NG, and Gross NG. We construct a large-scale industrial dataset of high-resolution microscopic images spanning seven representative defect categories, comprising over 3,800 images with pixel-level instance annotations for Track 1 and over 2,600 images with severity-grade labels for Track 2. The challenge attracted 86 registered participants with 130 submissions; during the final testing phase, 21 teams submitted results and 12 teams provided models with technical reports. The resulting benchmark, together with the diverse and effective solutions contributed by participating teams, sets a new standard for industrial defect analysis research.

DroneIQA-VLE: Multi-Task Drone Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Ensemble

We present DroneIQA-VLE, our solution to the ICME 2026 Drone-IQA Grand Challenge on Target-aware Image Quality Assessment for Low-altitude UAV Images. The framework jointly predicts global, target, and background quality scores by ensembling two complementary pipelines: (1) SigLIP2 vision encoders with multi-task regression heads, and (2) a LoRA-adapted Qwen3.5-9B multimodal large language model for quality score regression. The final global quality prediction is obtained by arithmetically averaging the outputs of both pipelines. Our method achieves 2nd place in the challenge, demonstrating its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/sunwei925/DroneIQA-VLE.