OpenCV AI Competition 2026 - OpenCV

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Build vision systems that see, reason, and act with OpenCV 5 and Amazon Web Services (AWS).<br>Win money and bragging rights!

Submit Grant Proposal

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$12,000

Total Prizes

50

AWS Compute Grants

2 Months

To Build Your Project

OpenCV AI Competition 2026, powered by AWS

Competition At A Glance

Register & Submit Proposals<br>Begins Aug 12, 2026. Register and  Submit a proposal for an AWS Compute Grant valued at $150.

AWS Cloud Compute Grants<br>50 teams selected to receive AWS Grant. Teams not selected are still eligible to participate and win prizes.

Build Phase<br>Aug 26 – Oct 26. Build, evaluate, document, submit.

Core Requirements<br>OpenCV 5 for substantive image/video analysis + a meaningful AWS component.

Prizes<br>1st: $5,000 / 2nd: $3,000 / 3rd: $2,000, plus two $1,000 special awards.

Winners Announced<br>Nov 10, 2026 , on OpenCV Live! stream.

Sponsored by Amazon Web Services (“Amazon” or “Sponsor”)<br>Administrated by The Open Source Vision Foundation (OpenCV or Administrator, and together with Amazon, the “organizers”)

Join, build, and win

Turn an ambitious idea into a working vision application, demonstrate measurable value, and share it with the global OpenCV community.

The competition emphasizes Physical AI and Generative AI systems in which visual understanding drives useful decisions, actions, predictions, or interactions. Any programming language or supporting hardware is allowed.

Projects may use any programming language or supporting hardware, provided they meet the core OpenCV 5 and AWS requirements.

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Focus Paths

Pursue either path, combine both, or take another approach — all entries remain fully eligible for the Overall Awards.

Cloud-Optimized Vision with COOL

Use the Cloud-Optimized OpenCV Library (COOL), available through AWS Marketplace and optimized for AWS Graviton, to accelerate widely used vision operations and move from prototype to scalable cloud deployment. Strong submissions will document a reproducible deployment and comparison against an appropriate baseline. Strong submissions will:

Show that COOL executes the core image or video workload on the Arm path.

Report reproducible measurements such as latency, throughput, utilization, cost, or developer productivity against an appropriate baseline.

Explain any x86 and Arm coexistence, container, server, or serverless architecture.

COOL must execute the claimed core workload on AWS Graviton or the Arm component of a documented hybrid architecture.

COOL on AWS Marketplace

Agentic Vision with OpenCV 5

Build a workflow in which an agent uses OpenCV 5 tools within a multi-step perception-decision-action loop. To qualify, image or video results must influence a subsequent plan, tool call, action, or request for human approval. A chatbot that only explains a fixed vision result is not enough—the visual evidence must change what the system does next.

Examples include autonomous inspection, visual troubleshooting, embodied assistants, active perception, safety monitoring, and human-in-the-loop operations.

The agent may use any framework or model and may invoke OpenCV 5 and, where applicable, COOL through APIs, tools, or Model Context Protocol (MCP).

A developer-agent workflow qualifies only when it iteratively invokes, evaluates, and adjusts an OpenCV 5 workload, with COOL where applicable—for example, by using visual test outputs or runtime measurements to change a later tool call, configuration, or deployment—and culminates in a running image or video workload.

Using an AI coding assistant to write the entry does not itself qualify as Agentic Vision.

Suggested project areas

Projects are not limited to these areas , but the organizers especially welcome:<br>Active Perception<br>Autonomous inspection with agentic orchestration or MCP.

Video Prediction<br>Physics-informed prediction for process control.

Visual SLAM<br>Multi-agent SLAM with distributed context.

Spatial Digital Twins<br>Real-time twins of physical environments.

COOL Pipelines<br>Server, serverless, container, or hybrid x86/Arm using Cloud-Optimized OpenCV.

Developer Agents<br>Integrate COOL with Codex, Claude Code, Kiro, or MCP systems.<br>Other Suggested Areas<br>Healthcare, Safety, Accessibility, Agriculture, Environmental monitoring, Smart cities, Education, Retail, & Sports analytics

How The Competition Works

Register & Propose

Begins Aug 12. Form a team of up to four members and submit a written proposal to get an AWS Compute Grant.

Proposal review

Aug 18 Onward. Up to 50 teams selected for a grant; notices to be sent to awarded teams.

Build

Aug 26 – Oct 26. Midpoint check-ins Sep 21 – Oct 2 for grant recipients.

Judging & winners

Oct 27 – Nov 9 judges will review submissions and rank them. Winners announced Nov 10.

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What AWS Grant Proposals Must Include

Each proposal must include:<br>A team name

A clear problem statement and...