The OpenCV AI Competition 2026 invites global developers to solve real-world problems using computer vision, offering cash prizes, AWS compute grants, and open-source recognition.
On 24 August 2026, Open Source Vision Foundation (OpenCV) announced the opening of the OpenCV AI Competition 2026 with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Individuals, students, researchers, and teams of up to 5 people can participate in the event. The competition asks contributors to design computer vision AI applications that address real-world use cases in healthcare, industrial, accessibility, autonomy, and safety sectors.
The winners of the contest will receive US$12,000 in total cash prizes, featuring US$5,000 for the first place, US$3,000 for second place, US$2,000 for the third place, and two special focus areas awards worth US$1,000 each. The special focus area awards are the Best Use of Cloud-Optimized OpenCV Library (COOL) and Agentic Vision awards, respectively.
Additionally, the 50 most popular projects on the OpenCV AI Competition website will receive an AWS compute grant that will allow them to deploy their ideas on AWS. The developers should use AWS Graviton-based instances while working on the AWS cloud. The competition focuses on active perception for autonomy inspection, physics informed video prediction, multi-agent visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and real-time spatial digital twin synchronization.
The competition building phase will start on 26 August and end on 26 October 2026. The winner list will be announced in November 2026. Remarkably, participants will be able to protect their intellectual property while contributing to the open-sourcing of their codes.
