Join the Synthetic Image Detection Challenge at MediaEval 2025

We are excited to announce the Synthetic Image Detection Challenge, a task of the MediaEval 2025 workshop organized by the EU-funded projects vera.ai and AI-CODE.

The use of synthetic media, generated by powerful AI techniques, has grown dramatically in recent years creating both exciting opportunities and serious concerns around authenticity and trust.

The challenge is designed to push forward the research on detecting synthetic images and manipulated regions of  images “in the wild”, helping to build tools and gain insights to meet this critical need.

Participants are asked to tackle two complementary tasks:

Task A - Real vs. Synthetic Image Classification: the task includes classifying whether an image is authentic or synthetic.

Task B - Manipulated Region Localization: the task focusses on identifying and localizing regions within an image that have been manipulated.

Who should participate?

We welcome researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts from areas such as:

  • Computer Vision
  • Multimedia Forensics
  • Machine Learning & AI
  • Security & Privacy
  • Digital Media and Journalism

How to join?

Registration is open through the MediaEval 2025 website: register here.

You’ll also find the dataset and submission instructions in the official GitHub repository: GitHub Repository

Key dates

Here's some key dates to note down:

  • Data release: 20 June 2025
  • Run submission deadline: 15 September 2025
  • Paper submission deadline: 8 October 2025
  • Workshop: 25–26 October 2025

Accepted teams will be invited to present their approaches and findings at the MediaEval 2025 workshop in October.

Why participate?

Here's why you should join us and what is awaiting you:

  • Benchmark your methods on challenging, real-world data.
  • Collaborate and exchange ideas with an international community of researchers and practitioners.
  • Contribute to advancing the state of the art in a fast-moving, high-impact field.

We look forward to your creative solutions and insightful contributions.

If you have questions about the challenge, feel free to reach out to the organizers via the contact information on the MediaEval website.

See you at MediaEval 2025!

Author: Olga Papadopoulou (CERTH-ITI)

Editor: Jochen Spangenberg (DW)

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