Five technologies spanning 3D vision, SPAD imaging, synthetic data and next-generation machine perception have been shortlisted for the VISION Award 2026.
Selected from this year’s submissions, the five finalists will present their innovations during the Industrial Vision Days at VISION 2026 in Stuttgart on 7 October, before the overall winner is announced.
The award recognises technological excellence in industrial image processing, with this year’s shortlist highlighting several of the technologies currently reshaping machine vision.
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology – PHOTODEX
AIT has been shortlisted for PHOTODEX, a mobile inspection system designed to bring photometric stereo into moving, handheld and robotic applications.
The technology combines high-speed imaging with colour-coded strobing illumination to capture the required photometric information in two closely spaced exposures. Detected defects can also be registered against a CAD model, connecting surface inspection with digital twins and creating spatially referenced data for AI-based quality assurance.
Lidwave – Odem
Lidwave’s Odem is a 4D coherent vision sensor designed to measure range, reflectivity and instantaneous velocity at each pixel.
Rather than calculating motion by comparing successive frames, the sensor measures velocity directly using Doppler information. Its optical engine is integrated onto a single silicon chip, with potential applications spanning robotics, autonomous mobile robots, drones and industrial automation.
Medabsy – Virtualising Machine Vision
Medabsy has been shortlisted for its software platform for virtually designing machine vision systems and generating synthetic training data.
Users can import a 3D model of a component, configure imaging hardware and simulate inspection results before building the physical system. The same digital environment can generate photorealistic synthetic datasets with pixel-level defect annotations for training machine-learning models.
MVPro recently explored this approach in more detail in From CAD to AI: How Synthetic Data Is Changing Machine Vision Training.
photonicSENS – Industrial 3D Light Field Vision
Spanish company photonicSENS has been shortlisted for its work bringing plenoptic, or light field, imaging into industrial 3D vision.
Its technology captures a 2D image and depth information simultaneously from a single sensor and single exposure, without requiring a projected pattern. The approach is designed for applications including precision inspection, electronics manufacturing and robotic vision.
Singular Photonics – Litavis
Singular Photonics’ Litavis is a software-configurable SPAD image sensor combining single-photon detection with digital photon processing directly on-chip.
The architecture can combine photon-counting imaging, programmable time gating and photon timing, allowing the same sensor platform to be adapted for applications including machine vision, robotics, LiDAR and industrial automation.
The nomination follows Singular Photonics’ recent $2.15 million funding round to accelerate development of its next generation of SPAD image sensors.
All five finalists will present their technologies during a one-hour VISION Award session on 7 October from 11:00 to 12:00 in Hall 8, Booth C70, where the winner of the VISION Award 2026 will be announced..
Find out more: https://www.messe-stuttgart.de/vision/en/programme/vision-award/shortlist-of-the-best-submissions/
