The 26th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering

August 25, 2026 to August 28, 2026
HES-SO / University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Call for Competitors

DocEng 2026 is hosting two competitions that challenge the document engineering community to advance the state of the art in computational document processing and analysis. Competitions provide an excellent platform for benchmarking new approaches and fostering innovation in the field.

We invite researchers and practitioners to participate. Each competition is described in full on its own page, including task description, dataset, evaluation criteria, deadlines, and submission rules.


1. OCRs for Corpus Extraction for the Maltese Language

Develop an OCR model for transcribing images of paragraphs from Maltese PDFs, trained on synthetic data only. The competition addresses the challenges of low-resource languages and benchmarks OCR models using the Character Error Rate (CER) metric.

Organizers: Marc Tanti, Stefania Cristina, Alexandra Bonnici (University of Malta)

Submission deadline: June 30, 2026

Read the full call


2. Photographed Document Image Binarization — Quality, Time & Size Assessment

Assess the performance of binarization algorithms on photographed document images, with submissions compared against 102 well-known binarization algorithms. Three aspects are measured: image quality (PSNR), processing time, and compressed file size.

Organizers: Rafael Dueire Lins (UFPE), Steven J. Simske (Colorado State), Gabriel Pereira e Silva (UFRPE)

Submission deadline: July 16, 2026

Read the full call


Contact

For general questions about competitions, please contact docengsymposium@gmail.com.

For specific questions about a competition, please contact the organizers listed on each competition page.