The 1st AI Children Challenge

Boyi Li, Yifan Shen, Houze Yang, Xu Cao, Guojun Yun, Li Gao, Turong Chen, Long Xu, Jianguo Cao, Meihuan Huang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2026, pp. 5564-5570

The First AI Children Challenge aims to advance real-world applications of computer vision and AI in child healthcare, child education, and pediatrics. The 2026 CV4CHL edition featured the first track in this domain: Children Gait Visual Analysis. The main goal of Children Gait Visual Analysis is the fine-grained analysis of children's gait behaviors from keypoint sequences. This is still a big challenge for human action recognition. Experienced medical doctors can distinguish these subtle nuances, but none of the people test AI models in this domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce thousands of 2D children keypoint sequences walking around videos across various age groups of children (3-16 years old). There is a significant opportunity for batch analysis of these videos to provide clinically relevant insights into medical diagnosis. The Challenge will be launched with two problem tracks: Edinburgh Visual Gait Score (EVGS) Scoring and Classification of Gait Patterns in Bilateral Spastic Cerebral Palsy. Each track is chosen in consultation with board-certified pediatricians based on the value of potential solutions. With the first available dataset for such tasks and ground truth for each track, the challenge enabled participants to evaluate their solutions. Final rankings will be revealed after the competition concludes, fostering reproducibility and mitigating overfitting.