Seeing Machines Publishes Technical Paper on Real-Time 3D Human Understanding for Physical AI

SmartSens announced that its 2026 private placement of A-shares to selected investors has been completed, with 36.7605 million shares issued at 87.05 yuan per share, raising total proceeds of approximately 3.2 billion yuan. The 11 allottees in this placement include a national-level industry fund, leading downstream companies, top investment institutions, and international capital. Among them, Huaxin Dingxin Beijing Equity Investment Fund became the largest allottee with nearly 800 million yuan, backed by the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund. DJI's wholly owned subsidiary Shanghai Feilai Information and the robot vision company Orbbec both made strategic investments, with the former allotted 100 million yuan and the latter having previously signed a deepened strategic cooperation agreement with SmartSens. The proceeds will be directed to three main areas: 1.445 billion yuan for the research, development, and industrialization of CMOS image sensor solutions for high-performance imaging applications, focusing on products ranging from 50 million to 200 million pixels; 753 million yuan for CMOS image sensor solutions for intelligent driving; and 741 million yuan for CMOS image sensor and edge AI ASIC solutions for visual AI.

OKSI and Qualcomm Government Technologies, Inc., a division of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., announced a collaboration to deploy OKSI's OMNISCIENCE autonomy software portfolio on Qualcomm technologies. OMNISCIENCE delivers AI/ML-enabled capabilities through computer vision, including visual navigation, object detection and recognition, and mission execution, purpose-built to bring autonomy to unmanned platforms operating in complex, communications-constrained environments. The software portfolio has been optimized for the Qualcomm QCS8550 processor and is designed to scale across Qualcomm Technologies' broader IoT processor portfolio, giving platform developers and defense system integrators a flexible, production-ready path to deploying edge AI capabilities at scale. The collaboration will be showcased at the Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting 2026, taking place Oct. 12-14 in Washington, D.C. OKSI CEO Chris HolmesParker said that with OMNISCIENCE on the Qualcomm QCS8550 processor, autonomy stops being a multiyear development program and becomes a design-in decision, while Kim Koro, Senior Vice President of Qualcomm Government Technologies, said the two companies are helping move autonomy beyond demonstrations toward deployable, mission-ready capabilities.

AVerMedia Technologies and Stereolabs, an Ouster company, announced NVIDIA JetPack 7.2 support across all Stereolabs ZED X GMSL cameras and AVerMedia's NVIDIA Jetson carrier boards, giving robotics and edge AI developers a faster path from development to production. The collaboration pairs AVerMedia's Jetson carrier-board and Board Support Package engineering with Stereolabs' unified ZED X driver architecture, letting AVerMedia adapt the hardware-specific device tree and generate drivers for the JetPack and Jetson Linux versions customers require. The companies said the unified workflow lets hardware development and software releases progress in parallel, shortening validation cycles, while Stereolabs focuses on camera firmware, ISP performance and ZED SDK capabilities and AVerMedia handles carrier-board integration and validation. NVIDIA JetPack 7.2 introduces Jetson agent skills that optimize memory usage across the software stack, freeing memory for vision processing and AI workloads on smaller footprints and lowering total cost of ownership, and it adds official Yocto support for reproducible production images on Jetson Orin and Jetson Thor platforms. Ihsane Debbache, VP of Engineering at Stereolabs, said anchoring platform-specific integration work with AVerMedia lets both teams develop in parallel, and Alex Liu, Vice President of AVerMedia, said the combination helps customers reduce integration risk and deploy more capable AI vision systems faster. Ongoing support and transition to NVIDIA JetPack 7.2 will be available through AVerMedia's support form.

BlackBerry QNX and neueHCT said a major German automaker has selected neueHCT's HCT Luna High-Performance Smart Camera Solution for a global passenger vehicle platform that will launch in China. The program will cover vehicles sold in China, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, with production expected to start in 2027 and projected volumes of several million units over the first three years. According to the companies, the deal is the first major global program for the HCT Luna solution using QNX. The solution is built on Horizon Robotics' Journey 6B automotive computing platform and runs on QNX OS for Safety 8.0. The smart camera system supports features such as automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, and traffic light recognition, and is designed to handle situations including vehicle cut-ins, sharp curves, construction areas, and roads where lane markings are limited or absent. QNX said its software provides real-time performance and fault isolation and is certified to ISO 26262 ASIL D.

Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, announced on Monday, September 28, that it has reached an agreement to acquire World Labs, the artificial intelligence startup founded by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at 8.2 billion dollars. The move establishes AMD's foothold in research and development of Physical AI systems capable of understanding and simulating the real world. The acquisition will give AMD access to research in Spatial Intelligence, an emerging field focused on enabling AI systems to build three-dimensional models of environments and simulate physical interactions. World Labs had recently raised 1 billion dollars in a funding round earlier this year, in which AMD also participated. Dr. Fei-Fei Li, a renowned AI researcher known for her pioneering work in computer vision, will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist once the acquisition process is complete. She will report to AMD CEO Lisa Su, and the deal is expected to close by the end of 2026.

The global computer vision market is projected to grow from $17.75 billion in 2025 to $20.52 billion in 2026 and reach $37.1 billion by 2030, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 15.9%, according to the Computer Vision Market Report 2026 added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The 2025-to-2026 increase represents a CAGR of 15.6%, with growth driven by declining computing costs, wider adoption of automation technologies, early machine vision systems and increased deployment of industrial robots. Continued investment in AI-based image recognition and real-time video analytics is expected to sustain growth through the end of the decade, supported by improvements in deep learning models, the development of autonomous vehicles, the expansion of smart factories and rising demand for real-time operational insights, with edge computer vision, 3D vision systems and vision-guided automation also shaping product development. Retail digitalization is a significant factor supporting demand, as retailers invest in cashierless checkout, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, cloud computing, Internet of Things infrastructure and mobility solutions, while the expansion of e-commerce reinforces demand for automated warehousing, visual product identification and streamlined fulfillment. In May 2025, Amniscient Inc. launched AmniSphere, a computer vision AI platform offering real-time operational monitoring, reported accuracy of 99.9% and a low-code interface, and in March 2025, SightLine Applications LLC acquired Athena AI for an undisclosed amount to combine AI-enabled vision, geospatial analysis and neural network-based decision-support capabilities with SightLine's edge video processing platform. Asia-Pacific was the largest region in the computer vision market in 2025, while North America is expected to record the fastest growth during the forecast period, and the report benchmarks companies including Microsoft Corporation, Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation, Intel Corporation, Texas Instruments Incorporated and MediaTek Inc.