Real-World Surveillance: Applications and Challenges (RWS) is a full-day, 6th-edition WACV workshop that brings together researchers to close the gap between research and deployment in real-world surveillance settings.

Call for Papers
Computer vision methods trained on public databases demonstrate performance drift when deployed for real-world surveillance, compared to their initial results on the test set of those employed databases. In this workshop, we are interested in papers reporting their experimental results on any application of computer vision in real-world surveillance and object security, including the protection of buildings and facilities within critical infrastructure, challenges they have faced, and their mitigation strategy on topics like, but not limited to:

- Object detection
- Tracking
- Action recognition
- Scene understanding
- Super-resolution
- Multi-modal surveillance

Furthermore, the workshop has a special attention to legal and ethical issues of computer vision applications in real-world scenarios. We therefore also welcome papers describing their methodology and experimental results on legal matters (like GDPR, AI Act, and US Executive Order on AI) or ethical concerns (like detecting bias towards gender, race, or other characteristics and mitigating strategies). We particularly encourage submissions addressing safety, reliability, and regulatory compliance for critical infrastructure protection, as well as privacy-preserving approaches in high-security environments.

The workshop is also organizing a competition on "Robust Thermal-Image Object Detection": https://www.codabench.org/competitions/10954/

Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: December 7th, 2025 (11:59 PM, AoE)
Paper submission deadline for challenge participants: December 14th, 2025 (11:59 PM, AoE)
Decision notification: December 23rd, 2025
Camera-ready: January 9th, 2026 (11:59 PM, PT)