[Palo Alto, CA] — The Open Source Vision Foundation (OpenCV), home to the world’s most widely used open-source computer vision library, today announced the OpenCV AI Competition 2026 in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is the latest in OpenCV’s popular AI Competition series, which has sparked the imaginations of developers since 2020.

Registration is open today at https://opencv.org/opencv-ai-competition-2026

The competition is open to individual developers, students, researchers, and multidisciplinary teams from anywhere in the world. The challenge is to build applications that use image or video analysis to address real problems, whether in healthcare diagnostics, industrial inspection, accessibility, autonomous systems, safety monitoring, or any other domain where computer vision can do meaningful work.

The format is structured to bring quality projects to the forefront. After a 15-day registration window, teams will submit written project proposals for review. Up to 50 top projects will be selected to receive a $150 AWS Compute Grant to build with, with OpenCV conducting check-in sessions with teams at the midpoint. Final submissions are to be evaluated by an independent panel drawn from industry, academia, and the computer vision community judging projects on innovation, technical execution, real-world impact, user experience, and documentation quality. Participants retain full intellectual property rights to everything they build but are encouraged to release their code as open source.

Cash prizes totaling $12,000 will be awarded: $5,000 for first place, $3,000 for second, and $2,000 for third. Two additional special prizes will be awarded: The Best Use of Cloud-Optimized OpenCV Library, and The Agentic Vision Award with a $1,000 prize for each.

Technical areas of particular interest include active perception for autonomous inspection, physics-informed video prediction, multi-agent visual SLAM, and real-time spatial digital twin synchronization. Projects must incorporate computer vision as a core functional component. Previous OpenCV AI Competition prize-winning projects have included high-tech wheelchairs and other assistive devices, STEM learning tools for school curriculums, and agricultural innovations in weeding and plant monitoring.

The competition encourages projects that take advantage of cloud-scale infrastructure, including the high-value low-cost AWS Graviton-based compute, offering an average 1.5x processing speedup thanks to the recently released Cloud Optimized OpenCV Library (COOL).

“This competition gives developers worldwide the chance to build something that matters,” said OpenCV CEO Dr. Satya Mallick. “We are excited to see teams who have an exciting, clear, idea and the skills to execute it create amazing projects.”

More information on COOL is available in AWS Marketplace at https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=seller-q3au5rsqt2mq6

About OpenCV
The Open Source Vision Foundation develops and maintains OpenCV, the world’s largest open-source computer vision library, used by millions of developers and researchers globally. Learn about the new OpenCV 5 release at opencv.org.

Media Contact:
Phil Nelson, [email protected]