Latest updates
Announcements, awards, research results and media coverage from Beacon.
Beacon launches its official website
Our new website introduces Beacon’s technology, use cases, research and team for dark-space inspection footage.Toma Okugawa writes “Seeing in the Dark: How My Research Became Two Startups” on Medium
Founder Toma Okugawa’s essay on how research on low-light image enhancement grew into two startups.(opens in a new tab)Our NICT Award at the Tongali Business Plan Contest 2026 featured in “Koho Kamijima”
The August 2026 issue of the Kamijima Town (Ehime) newsletter featured Beacon’s NICT Award.SD-Retinex paper and code released
We released the paper on SD-Retinex, our training-free low-light enhancement method, on Zenodo, together with the reference implementation, evaluation code and per-image metric tables on GitHub.Featured in NICT’s “Tongali Business Plan Contest 2026” results report
The ICT Startup Support Center of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) published its Tongali Business Plan Contest 2026 results report; Beacon received the NICT Award at the contest.(opens in a new tab)Four awards, including the NICT Award, at the Tongali Business Plan Contest 2026
At the final in June 2026, Beacon’s business plan received the NICT Award, the JR Central Award, the Beyond Next Ventures Award and 5th place for the Tongali Award.Founder Toma Okugawa interviewed by KOSEN MONSTER
KOSEN MONSTER, a media outlet covering KOSEN students, published an interview with our founder Toma Okugawa about deep tech and regional revitalization (in Japanese).(opens in a new tab)XCR preprint released on Jxiv
We proposed XCR, a fast, structure-preserving Retinex method based on a complex exponential kernel that processes 1080p video at an average of 15.32 FPS on a CPU alone.Fast Single-Scale Retinex preprint released on Jxiv
We proposed a fast Single-Scale Retinex and evaluated real-time skeleton detection in low-light environments.