Introduction
Welcome to the 2nd Workshop on Smart Cameras for Physical AI at BMVC 2026! After a successful first edition at BMVC 2025 with 100+ in-person attendees, we return with a sharper focus: cameras as the foundation of reliable robot perception.
Robots, drones, and autonomous systems live or die by the quality of their visual input. A weak ISP, a noisy RAW frame, a damaged lens, or an uncontrolled enhancement model can break recognition, mapping, planning, and action. This workshop brings together computational photography, low-level vision, robotics, and edge AI to discuss how to design camera pipelines that are robust, controllable, and useful for downstream intelligence — including VLMs and VLAs.
Previous edition: BMVC 2025 — Smart Cameras for Smarter Autonomous Vehicles and Robots.
Speakers
Tentative Schedule
Full-day workshop outline. Times are tentative and will be confirmed closer to BMVC 2026.
| Welcome & opening | 09:00 – 09:15 |
| Paper spotlights | 09:15 – 09:45 |
| Marcos V. Conde — Cameras for Robots | 09:45 – 10:30 |
| Coffee break | 10:30 – 11:00 |
| Ziteng Cui (University of Tokyo) | 11:00 – 11:45 |
| Andrew Wang (Blur Labs) | 11:45 – 12:30 |
| Lunch break | 12:30 – 13:30 |
| Hirokatsu Kataoka (AIST / Oxford VGG) | 13:30 – 14:15 |
| Tom Bishop (Glass Imaging) | 14:15 – 15:00 |
| Coffee / posters & demos | 15:00 – 15:40 |
| Open discussion, challenges & closing | 15:40 – 16:15 |
Call for Papers
We invite paper submissions on computational photography and low-level computer vision with applications in robotics and autonomous systems. Topics include, but are not limited to:
- camera-based perception
- lens and optics
- neural / classical ISPs
- image restoration & enhancement
- drone and aerial imaging
- novel image datasets
- sensor fusion
- real-time / edge AI
- VLMs and VLAs for robots
- robust sensing under adverse conditions
Papers should follow the BMVC 2026 format. Reviewing is double blind. Accepted papers must be presented at the workshop. Submission link will be announced soon. See also the BMVC 2026 website.
Important Dates (tentative)
| Submission deadline | 7th August 2026 |
| Notification of acceptance | 21st August 2026 |
| Camera-ready submission | 4th September 2026 |
| Workshop date | 26th November 2026, Lancaster, UK |
Microsoft CMT service
The Microsoft CMT service may be used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this workshop. This service is provided for free by Microsoft and they bear all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.
Organizers
Marcos V. Conde
University of Würzburg
Shivansh Rao
Glass Imaging
Ziteng Cui
University of Tokyo
Radu Timofte
University of Würzburg
Lev Markhasin
Tenkai AI
Álvaro García
CIDAUT AI
Contact marcos.conde@uni-wuerzburg.de
Sponsors & Supporters
