The Latent in the Wild Fingerprint Recognition Competition is held within the International Joint Conference of Biometrics (IJCB) 2026.
In the past decade, several studies have focused on developing latent fingerprint recognition algorithms. However, the performance evaluation of these methods was conducted on only a few databases, such as the NIST SD27 Database, IIIT-D Latent Fingerprint Database, and Tsinghua Overlapped Latent Fingerprint Database. Despite being valuable, these databases have major shortcomings:1) a small number of subjects respectively finger instances and latent fingerprint samples, 2) a constrained acquisition environment, and 3) limited availability. Moreover, one of the most commonly used latent fingerprint databases NIST SD27 Database has been withdrawn, making the development and performance evaluation of latent fingerprint recognition even more difficult.
From a review of existing works, we note that latent fingerprint recognition algorithms have rarely been tested on large-scale datasets. To the best of our knowledge, there is no large-scale latent fingerprint in the wild database containing reference fingerprints (ground truth), latent fingerprints, and fingerphotos acquired from different surfaces that come from a large number of unique subjects. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a latent fingerprint comparison competition that evaluate comparison algorithms on a new large-scale latent fingerprint in the wild database to meet the need for robust latent fingerprint recognition algorithm development and evaluation.
For the 3rd edition of Latent in the Wild fingerprint recognition competition 2026, there are TWO tracks to participate:
Track1: latent fingerprint recognition (including the comparison of fingerphoto vs. latent fingerprint)
Track2: latent fingerprint quality assessment
Participants can choose either of the two tracks or take part in BOTH tracks!
5, March - Call for participation, website release, and registration open.
9, March - Release of dataset.
21, March - Round 1 submission.
15, April - Round 2 submission.
10, May - Round 3 (final) submission.
25, May - Announcement of results to participants.
30, May - Submit competition paper to IJCB2026.
Registration:
Registration for the competition can be done by email. If you would like to register, please send email with a subject line 'IJCB Competition: Latent in the Wild-2026' to xinwei_liu@zwu.edu.cn
Email should contain:
Which Track you would like to participate (Track1, Track2, or BOTH Tracks)
Team members (maximum 5 members), affiliations, and Team Name.
Main contact person and contact details (email, phone number, mailing address)
Short biography of the main contact person.
Kiran Raja - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway.
Xinwei Liu - Zhejiang Wanli University, China.
For any question, please write to: xinwei_liu@zwu.edu.cn