In an industry that moves at the speed of light, it is important to pause and recognize the many accomplishments coming from dedicated research and development teams. This is the real spirit behind our Innovators Awards program, where we encourage companies to submit their latest innovations for consideration.
The honorees will receive their awards at a January 2026 reception held in San Francisco between SPIE BiOS and Photonics West.
Now, meet our honorees…
PLATINUM-LEVEL HONOREES
Keysight
ImSym imaging system simulator
Developing a new imaging product often involves long development cycles and high risks due to reliance on physical prototypes to assess image quality, difficulties in managing system complexity, and barriers to collaborating between designers, manufacturers, OEMs, and partners. ImSym – Imaging System Simulator, the first commercial software for virtual prototyping of imaging systems, helps accelerate imaging design cycles, enhance team collaboration, mitigate development risks, and reduce costs by considering overall performance. By shifting the majority of imaging system development into virtual prototyping, ImSym facilitates a seamless collaboration across the development team, enables testing and validating the imaging chain before manufacturing, and helps new products get to market faster.
The imaging chain of digital optical image acquisition systems consists of a series of interdependent steps or links. Some of the significant links in the imaging chain include the scene, the action of the optics on the light exiting the scene, the action of the detector array and readout electronics in converting photons to electrons and then ultimately to digital counts, and the image and signal processing algorithms that act upon the detected digital counts.
Different specialists may be involved in different links in the imaging chain. For example, a lens design engineer is typically responsible for the design of the optics, while an engineer specializing in stray light analysis may be responsible for designing components that limit the propagation of stray light through the system. The digital imaging system may require the services of an engineer specializing in detector array use, design, or analysis, as well as an engineer specializing in image and signal processing.
Traditionally, optical system builders have relied on one or more physical prototypes to optimize and confirm imaging system performance. These physical prototypes can provide performance assurances, such as image quality assessment, but require significant build time and expenses. The traditional approach also makes it difficult to manage system complexity and imposes barriers to collaboration between specialists involved in the imaging systems development chain.
By providing a physics-based, end-to-end simulation platform, ImSym enables the validation of camera systems before manufacturing and during assembly. ImSym provides a quantitative model of an optical system. It models the entire imaging pipeline, including user-specified scenes, external light sources, optics, optomechanical parts and housing, image sensors, and customizable image signal processing (ISP) algorithms. System engineers and domain experts can simulate effects from all components before manufacturing.
ImSym enables tailored optimizations of any imaging system, facilitates team collaboration, and dramatically reduces development risk. With accuracy powered by industry-proven CODE V and LightTools optical design software and a quantitative end-to-end simulation flow, ImSym reduces the need for physical prototypes and delivers virtual prototyping that can accelerate imaging system design cycles at reduced cost.
ImSym also addresses the entire development cycle. First-order models can be used at the beginning stages of the optical imaging system design. As the subsystem models are matured to the conceptual, preliminary, and final design stages, each subsystem model can be updated in ImSym. Finally, measured subsystem performance models can replace design models to create a complete operational system model.