The Persistent Scene Change Detection and Localization (PSCDL 2026) challenge addresses the problem of identifying and localizing long-duration scene modifications in fixed-camera urban surveillance videos. While existing video analytics systems primarily focus on short-term events such as motion or intrusion, real-world urban management often requires detecting persistent changes such as unattended objects, debris accumulation, graffiti, illegal dumping, or temporary encroachments that remain over extended periods. These sustained modifications, though not immediately hazardous, can impact public safety, accessibility, and civic order if left unaddressed. Detecting them reliably is challenging due to illumination variations, weather conditions, dynamic backgrounds, and the need for robust temporal reasoning to distinguish transient motion from persistent presence.
In PSCDL 2026, participants are provided with video clips containing an initial clean baseline segment followed by the introduction of a persistent change and are tasked with both detecting the occurrence of the modification and generating a pixel-level binary mask for accurate localization. Submissions will be evaluated using pixel-level segmentation metrics such as Precision, Recall, and F1-score, with the goal of establishing a benchmark that advances practical, deployment-ready solutions for long-term scene monitoring in urban environments.
Data: Video clips begin with normal scene activity; later, a new object is introduced and remains visible for an extended duration.
Goal: Detect persistent scene changes and generate a pixel-level binary mask highlighting the change.
Evaluation: Performance is measured using pixel-level Precision, Recall, and F1-score.
Team: A team can consist of a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 4 members.
Top-performing participants may receive an internship opportunity at Vehant Research Lab, working on real-world computer vision systems from traditional ML to Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
| Event | Date |
| Registration opening and launch of challenge website | February 27, 2026 |
| Release of dataset | March 30, 2026 |
| Release of test set | April 13, 2026 |
| Opening date for submission to challenge | April 20, 2026 |
| Closing date for submission to challenge | June 5, 2026 |
| Winner announcement | June 20, 2026 |
| Position | Prize |
| Winner | 25,000 |
| Runner-up | 20,000 |
Organizers:
Dr. Shikha Gupta, Shivam Nigam, Md. Rizwan Ahmad, Abhijith P Mahadevan
For any query please contact: contest@vehant.com
+91-120-4610200 
contact@vehant.com 