ICPR 2026 Competition on Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition

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/

BEAT2AASIST model with layer fusion for ESDD 2026 Challenge

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.

Experimental Study: Enhancing Voice Spoofing Detection Models with wav2vec 2.0

Conventional spoofing detection systems have heavily relied on the use of handcrafted features derived from speech data. However, a notable shift has recently emerged towards the direct utilization of raw speech waveforms, as demonstrated by methods like SincNet filters. This shift underscores the demand for more sophisticated audio sample features. Moreover, the success of deep learning models, particularly those utilizing large pretrained wav2vec 2.0 as a featurization front-end, highlights the importance of refined feature encoders. In response, this research assessed the representational capability of wav2vec 2.0 as an audio feature extractor, modifying the size of its pretrained Transformer layers through two key adjustments: (1) selecting a subset of layers starting from the leftmost one and (2) fine-tuning a portion of the selected layers from the rightmost one. We complemented this analysis with five spoofing detection back-end models, with a primary focus on AASIST, enabling us to pinpoint the optimal configuration for the selection and fine-tuning process. In contrast to conventional handcrafted features, our investigation identified several spoofing detection systems that achieve state-of-the-art performance in the ASVspoof 2019 LA dataset. This comprehensive exploration offers valuable insights into feature selection strategies, advancing the field of spoofing detection.