Imaging for Physical AI, 2nd Edition

About

Physical AI begins with photons. Before a robot can reason, navigate, or act, its cameras must turn a messy world of light into signals that AI models can trust. Every robot, drone, and autonomous system sees the world through a camera stack—and that stack is where most failures start: low light, dust, blur, bad weather, imperfect optics, sensor noise, miscalibration, and brittle ISPs.

Imaging for Physical AI is where sensing meets intelligence. We bring together sensors, optics, neural ISPs, low-level vision, and downstream perception—so cameras stop being passive pixel sources and become trusted, deployable eyes for machines.

Built on the BMVC 2025 Smart Cameras workshop (100+ attendees) and the ICCV 2025 neural imaging tutorial. At ACCV 2026 in Osaka, we aim to make this the reference community for Imaging for Physical AI.

Call for Papers

A venue for students and researchers to present work on imaging for robotics, and embodied AI. Topics include:

Task-aware image quality — detection, tracking, mapping, control
Neural & robust camera pipelines — RAW, denoising, deblur, HDR, ISP
AI + optics co-design — aberrations, SWaP, edge cameras
Novel sensing — events, ToF/gated, polarization, thermal
Embodied perception — VLM/VLA robustness, sim-to-real
Evaluation & safety — metrics, failures, uncertainty, realtime

4-page extended abstracts / short workshop papers, double-blind review. Accepted work will be presented as posters, with selected orals and lightning talks. The track is non-archival (listed on the website).

Submission deadline	October 5, 2026
Notification	November 2, 2026
Camera-ready / poster material	November 16, 2026
Workshop	December 14, 2026 · Room 1006 · ACCV Osaka

Submission link will be announced here soon.

Tentative Schedule

Full-day · Room 1006 · December 14, 2026 · times local to Osaka (tentative).

09:00 – 09:15	Welcome & opening remarks
09:15 – 10:30	Invited talks — imaging & neural ISPs
10:30 – 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 – 12:15	Contributed orals / spotlights
12:15 – 13:30	Lunch
13:30 – 14:45	Invited talks — robotics, adverse conditions & deployment
14:45 – 15:45	Posters & demos
15:45 – 16:05	Coffee break
16:05 – 16:45	Failure cases & open challenges
16:45 – 17:30	Panel & closing