The Picture Coding Symposium (PCS) is an international forum devoted to advances in visual data coding. Established in 1969, it has the longest history of any conference in this area. The 39th event in the series, PCS 2027, will be held in Mexico City, the capital and largest city of Mexico. Mexico City’s location and rich history makes it one of the most important cultural and financial centers in Latin America.

PCS 2027 will host the 8th Challenge on Learned Image Compression (CLIC 2027)Link opens in a new window. This challenge aims to advance the field of image and video compression using machine learning and computer vision. It is also an opportunity to evaluate and compare end-to-end trained approaches against classical approaches. CLIC submissions include a white paper on the submitted technology. Submitters are invited to submit a full paper for peer review and publication in PCS.

Topics

PCS 2027 invites you to submit work that pushes the boundaries of image and video coding. The following list contains some examples, but it is not an exhaustive list:

* Image and video coding
* Model-based and synthetic coding
* Screen content coding
* Multimodal coding and processing
* Learning-based image and video coding
* Image and video coding with/for vision-language models
* Compressed-domain image/video analysis
* Datasets for learning-based visual data coding and analysis
* Image and video coding for machines
* Multi-task image and video coding
* Virtual, augmented, and mixed reality coding
* 360° & multi-view video processing and coding
* Point cloud processing and coding
* Light field processing and coding
* Immersive and volumetric video coding
* Representation, analysis and coding of immersive and volumetric scenes
* Emerging standards for visual data coding
* Objective and subjective quality assessment
* Transcoding and adaptive streaming
* Optimized streaming for coded visual data
* Live video communications
* Error robustness, resilience and concealment
* Low complexity video coding
* Energy management in compression

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in English, using the template provided, with a font size of 10pt and a maximum length of five (5) pages including all results, figures and references. Submissions will be accepted only in PDF format through the symposium website. The proceedings will be published by IEEEXplore and indexed by Scopus and EI.

Important Dates


CLIC Open Leaderboard -- 1 September 2026
Submissions of Special Session Proposals -- 1 November 2026
Special Session Acceptance Notification -- 15 November 2026
Paper Submission -- 26 January 2027
CLIC Close Leaderboard -- 1 March 2027
Notification of Paper Acceptance -- 9 March 2027
CLIC Submission Deadline -- 9 March 2027
CLIC White Paper Deadline -- 16 March 2027
Submission of Camera-Ready Papers -- 23 March 2027