STUTTGART, Germany, Aug. 5, 2026 — Organizers of VISION 2026, set to take place Oct. 6-8 in Stuttgart, have unveiled their shortlist for the VISION Award. The five companies will present their innovations during a 1-h session at the Industrial Vision Days on Oct. 7.

Courtesy of Messe Stuttgart.

The five shortlisted parties:

Australian Institute of Technology (AIT)
AIT was shortlisted for the development of PHOTODEX, a portable industrial inspection system that enables high-resolution surface inspection during continuous handheld or robotic operation. Its key innovation is the combination of motion-robust, quasi single-shot photometric stereo and automatic CAD-based localization in a single portable system.

Lidwave
Recognized for Odem, which the company describes as the first and only single-chip 4D lidar. The sensor measures true instantaneous velocity at each pixel — optically and in real time — on a single, calibration-free silicon chip. It provides range, reflectivity, and Doppler velocity in a single robust device that is manufacturable at a scalable that the company says conventional lidar cannot match.

Medabsy
Sharing the same name as the company that developed it, Medabsy is a CAD platform for designing machine vision systems. The software allows users to design machine vision systems using real market-ready hardware, and then generate photorealistic synthetic training data with “pixel-perfect” annotations. The technology creates datasets via physical light-transport simulation and mathematical texture/defect models to ensure physical accuracy, full controllability, and systematic coverage.

photonicSENS
photonicSENS earned shortlist honors for its camera technology, which captures a full 2D image and a metric, per-pixel depth map in a single shot, from a single sensor, with no projector, no scan axis, and no on-site calibration. Each depth point is a real angular measurement, not an inference, the company said.


Singular Photonics
Litavis, a next-generation single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) image sensor, gave Singular Photonics a spot on the shortlist. The device is the first all-in-pixel, next-generation SPAD platform, uniting imaging, timing, histogramming, and photon statistics on a single chip, the company said.

For more information about the shortlisted companies and their technologies, visit www.messe-stuttgart.de/en. Previous winners include Toshiba Teli Corporation (2024); Kitov.ai (2022); Prophesee (2021); and Photoneo (2018).