The 32nd VISION machine vision trade show, organized by Messe Stuttgart, took place in Stuttgart last week, attracting more than 9,000 professional visitors, up 14% from 2024. The event drew a record number of exhibitors and presented the VISION Start-Up Award.
A Laser Focus World article describes how photonics provides new measurement tools for agriculture, including monitoring crop conditions, assessing food quality and controlling plant growth.
Researchers have proposed the SF-PULSE lensless imaging method, which can monitor living cells over long periods without staining, and successfully imaged and reconstructed glioblastoma cells.
Why we recommend it: The article demonstrates an imaging approach that replaces lenses with computational reconstruction, offering reference value for low-cost microscopy
Ghost imaging replaces pixelated sensors with correlation measurements between structured illumination and a single-pixel detector. Researchers combined an optical frequency comb with deep learning to achieve faster ghost imaging with higher fidelity.
Why we recommend it: The article shows the combination of frequency comb illumination and AI reconstruction, a typical case of optics and AI working together in computational imaging
photonicSENS received the VISION Award at VISION 2026 in Stuttgart for its plenoptic camera, which captures a full 2D image and metric depth information simultaneously.
Huawei announced on September 29 that the Mate 90 series will launch on October 1, and showed the Huawei Ruiying Z10 modular camera in a teaser video, marking Huawei's entry into the external optics market for mobile imaging.
Niantic Spatial and the Singapore Land Authority have signed a memorandum of understanding to assess the technical feasibility of building Singapore's first national-scale Visual Positioning System (VPS).
A team led by Guojun Wu at the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Mechanics has proposed PGF-ULB, an underwater optical beacon detection and localization framework combining physics guidance and geometric constraints, for AUV optical docking in complex underwater environments.
Why we recommend it: The original article provides specific data and details that help assess the actual progress in this direction
A team at the Optoelectronics Center of the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics has published two results in Remote Sensing, proposing the lightweight keypoint localization framework GeoAdapt and the frequency-domain low-rank adaptation segmentation method Freq-LoRA for aerial target sensing in ground-based optical remote sensing. GeoAdapt has only 5.95M parameters and achieves PCK@0.05D of 89.3%; Freq-LoRA requires only 559K trainable parameters and reaches a mean intersection-over-union of 0.904 across five simulated weather datasets, achieving 96.1% of full fine-tuning performance.
The Optoelectronics Center of the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics published a paper in Analytical Chemistry describing CrisprDEM, a digital hydrogel fluorescence-enhanced microsphere detection system based on CRISPR/Cas12a that enables amplification-free relative quantification of nucleic acids. The system uses hydrogel microspheres to enrich fluorescent reporter molecules, boosting the fluorescence signal by a factor of about 1,000. A microfluidic chip then spreads the microspheres into a monolayer for imaging, and a K-means algorithm distinguishes positive from negative microspheres, with the proportion of positive microspheres used for quantification.
Ruier Mingkang (Zhejiang) Medical Technology Co., Ltd. has launched the DF600 series, China's first fully domestic laser fundus camera. Using a laser as its sole light source combined with confocal pinhole technology, the device enables layered imaging of the fundus. Its minimum imaging field reaches 130 degrees, while intelligent stitching covers up to 260 degrees. It requires only a 2 mm pupil without dilation, captures images in 0.1 seconds, and features built-in proprietary AI algorithms that identify the optic disc, blood vessels, macula, and hemorrhage spots without an internet connection. The DF600 has been deployed in endocrinology, health screening, emergency care, and other settings.