iQIYI Launches iCartoonFace Challenge Together with IJCAI-PRICAI 2020

BEIJING, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — iQIYI, Inc. (NASDAQ: IQ) (“iQIYI” or the “Company”), an innovative market-leading online entertainment service in China, announced that team registration is now open for its iCartoonFace Challenge (the “Challenge”), a cartoon character recognition competition held in partnership with IJCAI-PRICAI 2020 (The 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 17th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence) The Challenge is the first large-scale cartoon character recognition competition to be held in China, and is open for participation to teams from all over the world. The Challenge consists of two tracks – iCartoonFace Detection Challenge and iCartoonFace Recognition Challenge, and teams may choose to participate in one or both tracks.

iQIYI has in the past two years successfully held two video-based multimodal biometric recognition challenges, which helped significantly improve the accuracy of the multimodal recognition technology. With the cartoon character recognition challenge, iQIYI is once again at the vanguard of technological innovation, spurring the exploration and application of cartoon character recognition.

Data quality is one of the key factors affecting the training of deep learning algorithms, but existing cartoon datasets suffer from issues such as lack of data volume or noisy data. To support contestants to train their algorithms models, iQIYI will provide them with iCartoonFace detection and recognition datasets. The iCartoonFace detection dataset is the largest known manually tagged dataset for cartoon character detection. It contains a training dataset of 50,000 images and 91,163 cartoon faces as well as a test dataset of 10,000 images and 18,647 cartoon faces, whereas the iCartoonFace recognition dataset is the largest known manually tagged dataset for cartoon character recognition, containing 5,013 cartoon characters and 389,678 images. After manual tagging and multi-layer quality control, both datasets can guarantee an accuracy rate of at least 95%, which greatly enhances the precision of the test data for the competition.

Online registration will open through till May 14, and participating teams will be ranked based on an objective assessment and expert panel scoring. The top three teams in each challenge track will be awarded a cash prize of US$4,000, US$2,000 and US$1,000 respectively.

While character recognition technology in general is relatively mature, cartoon character recognition is an industry still in its infancy. In 2019, the animation industry in China was worth RMB 194.1 billion (US$27.6 billion), up 13.38% from a year earlier, according to the Qianzhan Industry Institute’s Report on the Prospects of and Investment Strategy Planning for China’s Animation Industry. As the animation industry rapidly advances, the first step for the intelligent understanding and even smart creation of cartoon videos is to identify the cartoon characters in them. The Challenge will help further optimize cartoon character recognition algorithms and enhance their accuracy, contributing to the gradual standardization of the whole field.

IJCAI and PRICAI, both leading academic conferences on artificial intelligence, bring together a large number of AI experts from all over the world every year. iQIYI is committed to researching cutting-edge technologies and exploring the applications of new technologies in entertainment. At present, cartoon character recognition has been applied to iQIYI’s actual businesses, such as allowing users to identify the cartoon characters in the animation through a feature known as Qiguan (AI Radar).

iQIYI strives to build creative applications around cartoon characters like expressions, clips and lip-synchronization, and by holding the iCartoonFace Challenge, IQIYI will further promote the development of cartoon character recognition technology, thereby creating a better environment for the deep integration of technology and content and opening up more diverse scenarios for cartoon character recognition.

Teams that wish to participate in the challenge can sign up at:  http://challenge.ai.iqiyi.com/detail?raceId=5def71b4e9fcf68aef76a75e

About iQIYI, Inc.

iQIYI, Inc. is an innovative market-leading online entertainment service in China. Its corporate DNA combines creative talent with technology, fostering an environment for continuous innovation and the production of blockbuster content. iQIYI’s platform features highly popular original content, as well as a comprehensive library of other professionally-produced content, partner-generated content and user generated content. The Company distinguishes itself in the online entertainment industry by its leading technology platform powered by advanced AI, big data analytics and other core proprietary technologies. iQIYI attracts a massive user base with tremendous user engagement, and has developed a diversified monetization model including membership services, online advertising services, content distribution, live broadcasting, online games, IP licensing, online literature and e-commerce.

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SOURCE iQIYI, Inc.