The VBS is an international video content search competition anually performed since 2012, evaluating state-of-the-art interactive video retrieval systems. As in previous years, VBS 2026 will be part of the International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling 2026 (MMM 2026) in Prague, Czech Republic, and organized as a special side event to the Welcome Reception. It will be a moderated session where participants solve Known-Item Search (KIS), Ad-Hoc Video Search (AVS), and Question Answering (Q/A) tasks that are issued as live presentation of scenes of interest, either as a visual clip, or as a textual description. The goal is to find the correct segments (for KIS, exactly one segment, for AVS, many segments) or the correct answer (for Q/A tasks) as fast as possible and submit the answer (for KIS and AVS: segment description – video id and timestamp) to the VBS server (DRES), which evaluates the correctness of submissions.

Anyone with an exploratory video search tool that allows for retrieval, interactive browsing, and exploration in a video collection may participate.
There are no restrictions regarding allowed features, except for presentation screen recording during the competition, which is disallowed. That means in addition to interactive content search you can use any automatic content search as well.
Participants are expected to implement the functionality to send results and logs to the VBS Server via a REST API.

To participate, please submit an extended demo paper (6+2 pages in Springer LNCS format, where the 2 pages may be used for references) by the deadline (see below) via the MMM 2026 Submission System (please select "Video Browser Showdown" track, https://www.conftool.pro/mmm2026/). The submission should include a detailed description of the video search tool (including a screenshot) and how it supports interactive search in video data. Submissions will be peer-reviewed to ensure maximum quality. Accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of the MMM conference. In the public VBS session, each system needs to be presented (typically as a concise introductory video, or sometimes as a poster - but this will depend on the local situation and announced a few weeks before the competition).