From August 17 to 20, 2026, the Cité Internationale de Lyon hosted the 27th edition of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), before the event continued on August 21 and 22 on the INSA Lyon campus for its satellite workshops and tutorials. This flagship international conference of the IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition) brought together 1,150 participants from around the world, and it was the Imagine team that led the local organization of this edition, a major undertaking for the laboratory.

ICPR is the IAPR's flagship event and one of the leading conferences in the field of pattern recognition, covering a broad range of topics: computer vision, machine learning, image processing, speech and natural language processing, and sensor signal processing.

This 2026 edition brought together the international scientific community around a dense and varied program:

• 4 keynote talks given by internationally recognized researchers
• numerous parallel scientific sessions, focused notably on Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, medical imaging, biometrics, and document analysis
• poster sessions of 500 posters, allowing researchers and doctoral students to present their work and exchange with the community
• a Doctoral Consortium, dedicated to mentoring 35 young researchers by 11 senior researchers
• several thematic workshops, held notably on the Doua campus
• sessions dedicated to awards and scientific distinctions
• a gala dinner, which was also an opportunity to celebrate the IAPR's 50th anniversary and announce the upcoming ICPR editions

The four invited speakers illustrated the diversity of current research in pattern recognition and artificial intelligence:

• Henrik I. Christensen (Contextual Robotics Institute, UC San Diego) "Building a perception stack for autonomous driving"
• Alicia Fornés (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) "Challenges in Handwriting Recognition: The case of Historical Texts, Music Scores and Ciphers"
• Cuntai Guan (Nanyang Technological University) "Building a Foundation Model for EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces"
• Zhu Jun (Tsinghua University) "Towards Building General World Models"

ICPR 2026 also hosted the three 2026 IAPR Lecture Prize recipients, each of whom gave a plenary lecture associated with their distinction:

• Jiří Matas (Czech Technical University) received the IAPR King-Sun Fu Prize for his major contributions to evidence aggregation in geometric computer vision. His lecture, titled "Benchmarking for Robust Recognition in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models", addressed the challenges of evaluating foundation models trained on massive datasets.
• Zhangyang "Atlas" Wang (University of Texas at Austin) was awarded the IAPR J. K. Aggarwal Prize for his contributions to the efficient training and deployment of generative models, with applications to language and vision. He presented his work in a lecture titled "Where Does Learning Live in the Spectrum? From Principal Low-Rank Gradients to Off-Principal RL Post-Training".
• Sanghamitra Bandopadhyay (Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata) received the IAPR Maria Petrou Prize for her pioneering contributions to pattern recognition, evolutionary computation, and computational biology, as well as for her role as a role model for young researchers. Her lecture, "From Biological Data to Discovery: Computational Methods for Life Sciences", explored the contribution of computational methods to biological and medical research.

ICPR 2026 benefited from the support of 15 sponsors, across several categories:

• Silver Sponsor: IMDS
• Start-up Sponsors: Elevate, Exco, Yooz
• Academic Sponsors: INSA Lyon, Université Lyon 2, LIRIS, CNRS, ICOM Lyon 2
• Awards Sponsor: Springer Nature
• Other sponsors: Elsevier, Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Métropole de Lyon

The local organization of an event of this scale, over 1,150 participants across nearly a week, spread over two sites, represents a considerable undertaking. It was the Imagine team that led this organization, from logistical preparation to scientific coordination, while mobilizing numerous volunteers from the laboratory. Among LIRIS's permanent staff, Véronique Eglin, Bertrand Kerautret, Stéphane Bres, Killian Barrere, and Laure Tougne Rodet were particularly involved, holding chair roles within the organizing committee.

This edition of ICPR could not have taken place without the commitment of the local organizing team and the many LIRIS volunteers, who were mobilized throughout the week to welcome participants and ensure the event ran smoothly.

More information, the detailed program, and the full list of sessions are available at: https://icpr2026.org/