For the third consecutive year, Facephi is promoting this challenge on Presentation Attack Detection in Identity Cards (PAD-ID Card 2026) as part of the International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2026), which will take place in Rome, Italy, from September 1 to 4.
Facephi continues to invest in research and innovation to tackle identity fraud, which already accounts for 47% of financial fraud in Europe.
This edition, jointly organized by Facephi, Hochschule Darmstadt, and Fraunhofer IGD, aims to test new technological solutions and foster collaboration among researchers, universities, and companies.
It is important to highlight that this competition focuses on the research and development of more robust PAD models with the ability to generalize across different countries, and is not intended for commercial purposes.
The objective is to develop algorithms capable of detecting presentation attacks on identity documents and adapting to an increasingly sophisticated fraud landscape, consolidating the progress achieved in previous editions and strengthening innovation in reliable and robust identity verification systems.
What is the PAD-ID Card Challenge 2026 about?
The main goal of the challenge is to evaluate and promote the development of algorithms and models for Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) in identity cards and passports. It is designed to cover two complementary scenarios:
Track 1 – Algorithms (synthetic images):
Research-oriented, this track provides a dataset of synthetically generated images to train and evaluate PAD algorithms, ensuring a fully academic and controlled approach.
Track 2 – Models (real-world flows):
Aimed at teams that want to test their models against images from real verification processes. Participants are free to use any datasets they consider appropriate, simulating scenarios closer to commercial applications.
The challenge offers an independent and rigorous evaluation, enabling participants to measure the generalization capabilities of their models and compare results with the state of the art. In addition, teams will have the opportunity to be included as co-authors in the challenge summary paper and gain international recognition within the scientific and business communities.
Key dates
- March 4, 2026 – Registration opens and official website launch
- March 10, 2026 – Release of Track 1 datasets (for registered teams only)
- April 2026 – Evaluation platform available (Tracks 1 and 2)
- May 19, 2026 – Deadline for algorithm evaluation
- May 21, 2026 – Notification to abstract authors and winning teams
- May 30, 2026 – Abstract submission deadline
- July 23, 2026 – Camera-ready papers
- September 1–4, 2026 – IJCB 2026, Rome
You can find more information here.