A team led by the University of Central Florida (UCF) will receive a five-year, $19.2 million grant from the US Army Research Office to study light propagation and control in complex dynamic environments. The project, led by Guifang Li, will explore weak backscattering coherent measurement, inverse methods, AI analysis and multi-plane light conversion, with the goal of measuring and rapidly correcting optical field distortions when remote sensors or beacons cannot be placed. Potential applications include directed-energy systems, biological tissue imaging, laser medicine, remote sensing and free-space optical communications.
The 32nd VISION machine vision show, hosted by Messe Stuttgart, took place in Stuttgart last week, attracting more than 9,000 professional visitors, up 14% from 2024, with a record number of exhibitors. The VISION Start-up Award was also presented.
A Laser Focus World article describes how photonics is providing agriculture with new measurement tools, including monitoring crop conditions, assessing food quality and controlling plant growth.
Researchers 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 source demonstrates an imaging route that replaces lenses with computational reconstruction, offering insights for low-cost microscopy
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Photonics.comOptics industryOptics and AIPicksAI score6161
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, higher-fidelity ghost imaging.
Why we recommend it: The original article shows the combination of frequency comb illumination with AI reconstruction, a typical example of optics and AI working together in computational imaging
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Photonics.comOptics industryOptics and AIAI score5151
photonicSENS received the VISION Award at VISION 2026 in Stuttgart for its plenoptic camera, which can capture a full 2D image and metric depth information simultaneously.
A team from the Ozcan lab at the University of California, Los Angeles has developed a digital-optical hybrid system that can identify deepfake videos simultaneously across multiple channels.
Why we recommend it: The source article presents a new application of a diffractive optical processor for AI vision tasks, illustrating a practical use case for optical computing
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OFweek Optics Network · NewsOptics industryOptics and AIAI score5151
Huawei officially announced on September 29 that the Mate 90 series will launch on October 1, and showed the Huawei Ruiying Z10 module camera in a teaser video, marking Huawei's entry into external optics for mobile imaging.
Niantic Spatial has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Singapore Land Authority to assess the technical feasibility of building Singapore's first national-scale Visual Positioning System (VPS).
A paper in Light: Science & Applications combines dual-comb spectroscopy with computational ghost imaging and uses deep-learning reconstruction to achieve hyperspectral imaging.
A team led by Wu Guojun at the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Mechanics has proposed PGF-ULB, an underwater light beacon detection and localization framework combining physics guidance and geometric constraints, for AUV optical docking in complex underwater environments.
A team from the Optoelectronics Center at the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM) published two papers 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 just 559K trainable parameters and reaches a mean intersection-over-union of 0.904 across five simulated weather datasets, or 96.1% of full fine-tuning performance.
The Optoelectronics Center at 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, achieving a thousandfold-level enhancement of the fluorescence signal. 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.
Rueminkang (Zhejiang) Medical Technology Co., Ltd. has launched the DF600 series, China's first fully domestic laser fundus camera. Using laser as its sole light source combined with confocal pinhole technology, the device delivers layered imaging of the fundus. It covers a minimum field of 130 degrees, with intelligent stitching extending coverage to up to 260 degrees, requires only a 2 mm pupil without dilation, and captures images in 0.1 seconds. Built-in proprietary AI algorithms, requiring no internet connection, identify the optic disc, blood vessels, macula and hemorrhages. The DF600 has been deployed in endocrinology, health screening, emergency care and other settings.
Google describes how the Pixel camera's Add Me feature was developed. The feature merges two photos taken sequentially of the same scene, allowing the photographer to appear in the group shot. The second photographer sees an augmented reality overlay of the first photo to align the composition. The feature relies on multiple machine learning models running locally on the TPU of the Tensor G4 chip. Add Me launched with the Pixel 9 series.